The WaPo abets "epistemic closure"

I knew that headline would grab you.

But really, if Fred Hiatt and the rest of the Wise Men running the WaPo Opinion section had any scruples about forwarding an honest discourse in our society, they would fire Michael Gerson, former wordsmith for George W. Bush, current liar on the WaPo Opinion page.

Sadly, they have no such scruples.

Forgotten war

On a day when the Post's home page features a link to "analysis" of the finale of "Lost," Fred Hiatt complains that we don't spend enough time thinking about Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a time of joblessness and home foreclosures, it's not surprising that politics would focus on the economy more than on national security. And maybe, in a time of toxic partisanship, we should be grateful for this inattention to the wars, taking the absence of debate as a sign of rare bipartisan consensus. Certainly few would miss the vitriol of the Iraq debate of a few years back.

Yet there's something disquieting about the quiet. For one thing, it's yet another reminder of American society's separation from its professional military. As the November elections approach, candidates across the spectrum will ostentatiously wear their support for "our warriors" like body armor, which I suppose is better than the alternative. But as the troops become props, the real men and women who are sweating and taking fire and sleeping on hard ground 7,000 miles away are oddly missing from the conversation.

Which is kinda crazy given that Fred Hiatt has done more than most to stifle debate about the war.

UPDATE: Fixed a typo.

Dick Cheney's Washington Post

Fred Hiatt is intent on making the WaPo editorial pages a fact- and morality-free place for his readers' entertainment.

Sullivan notes, "Watching this paper die a sad a sordid death as it gathers a gaggle of neocon sycophants and has-beens around a proud war criminal like [former Vice President Dick] Cheney is truly depressing." And there may be depressing truth to some of the scuttlebutt I'm hearing about Thiessen's hiring, which is rumored to have come about after Hiatt had a series of off-the-record meetings with Cheney, during which Cheney pitched Thiessen as a potential hire. (In this respect, it looks like the Washington Post is, once again, frantically trying to play catch-up with the Politico.)

The designated moonbat

It's too uncomfortable for those in power to keep him around when history has proved him right.

That’s why the firing of Dan Froomkin now makes a perverse sort of sense. As long as the right was in power, he was in effect the Post’s designated moonbat, someone who attracted readers but didn’t threaten the self-esteem of the self-perceived serious people at the paper. But now he looks like someone who was right when the serious people were wrong — and that means he has to go.

Via Greenwald.