After the jump, one last goodbye illustration from the wonderful Sara Lautman.

I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget. [emphasis added.]

That’s from a post by Jay Rosen that I think gets at the heart of the Wikileaks war logs and the Afghanistan war in general, but also points to a larger malaise suffocating the country right now.  As Krugman warns of an American Lost Decade characterized by unnecessarily high unemployment and stagnation, Scahill reports that even after combat troops withdraw from Iraq an ever-expanding army of mercenaries will remain for “the foreseeable future.”

Nobody can pretend anymore that Afghanistan is going well or is even “winnable” (a loathsome word in that context if ever there was one), after the newly published war logs.  And for anyone who would like a front seat view to a kill in that country, watch Restrepo, a new documentary that follows a platoon of soldiers deployed in the Korengal Valley for a year in what is known as “The Valley of Death.”

Chris Hayes predicts that those calling for austerity measures in Europe — which may very well deepen the recession — will continue to be treated as the only Serious Experts in town no matter how disastrous their policies turn out to be, just as we saw in the run-up and aftermath of Iraq.  When it comes to calling for war or sacrifices from the poor, it is impossible to be too far to the right.

Forgive these broad strokes, which are in fact the hobgoblin of a successful blog post, but after reading Rosen’s quote above I can’t help myself.  The problems facing the country right now are too troubling to face head on, made more so by this country’s lackluster response to them.  It’s not just that the economy is failing, it’s that the Obama administration wasn’t able (or couldn’t, if you prefer) to enact a large enough stimulus to restart the economy.  As a result, we’ll see sluggish growth and a serious risk of deflation.

It’s not just that the war in Afghanistan is expensive and unwinnable, it’s that we know those truths, yet we will be an occupying power there in some capacity for years.  We acknowledge the futility of the endeavor, yet nothing changes.  This has resulted in a show of mental acrobatics from the establishment, whose response to the leaks has been a confused contradiction of: this is a serious crime/these papers say nothing new.  But this country is not a poem, and that contradiction will not open up a new mode of knowledge.  So we’re compelled to ask this absurd question: Can anyone imagine this country suddenly turning dovish, even though “everyone knows” the war is a complete mess?

It’s not just that the national security apparatus has spiraled out of control since 9/11 to the extent that no one knows how big it is or how much money it devours, it’s that the revelation two weeks ago by the Washington Post went virtually unnoticed.

In all of these cases and more — like the environment! — there are people who have waved the warning flags but have been ignored.  Many of those same people continue to offer suggestions to fix things: increase stimulus spending, draw down the occupations, decrease military spending, restore habeus corpus rights, close Guantanamo, and the list goes on.  Those voices exist in this country, yet they continue to go unheeded despite a Democratic president and large majorities in both chambers.

On some level, the explanation is the same as always: there’s money to be had in war, in tax cuts for the rich, in an ever-increasing privatization of this country’s military and intelligence forces.  And in denying climate change.  And in ensuring the health care bill wouldn’t have a public option.

But I can’t shake the feeling that we as a country are unable to see what we are because it’s too unpleasant.  The problems too overwhelming; the inequalities too embedded.  The foul promise of American Exceptionalism has dehydrated this country like a long walk in the desert, like the fourth shot of gutter whiskey a gambler needs to go all in yet again.

The problems this country faces are troubling, yes, but what’s truly horrifying to watch is our country turn away from clear solutions in favor of Established Wisdom.

Here is ThinkProgress, ably documenting how we can be sure that the farmer’s wife is the farmer’s wife — which in itself sounds like a line from a Cohen Brothers film.

– Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Marcus Garner confirmed to ThinkProgress that the paper independently found Eloise Spooner for her interview.

– Eloise and Roger H. Spooner are listed in the Iron City, GA phone book.

– The Spooners’ 62nd wedding anniversary, according to a blog post of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, was celebrated at the 2009 Tennessee Truck Show.

– Roger Spooner has been cited in “mainstream” news reports, including a 2002 Associated Press story in the Lexis-Nexis database, claiming to be a “survivor” of the USS Yorktown at anniversaries of the Battle of Midway, which purportedly happened in 1942.

– In a 2009 article, USS Yorktown survivor Roger Spooner claimed to have “discharge papers” from the Navy in his “wallet.”

Now, here’s Breitbart saying, well, well, what is knowing, REALLY?!?!

You tell me as a reporter how CNN put on a person today who purported to be the farmer’s wife? What did you do to find out whether or not that was the actual farmer’s wife? I mean, if you’re going to accuse me of a falsehood, tell me where you’ve confirmed that had this incident happened 24 years ago. [...]

You’re going off of her word that the farmer’s wife is the farmer’s wife?

And now here’s Freddy Reidenschneider, played by Tony Shalhoub, explaining to Ed Crane, the protagonist in The Man Who Wasn’t There, their legal strategy.

They got this guy, in Germany. Fritz Something-or-other. Or is it? Maybe it’s Werner. Anyway, he’s got this theory, you wanna test something, you know, scientifically – how the planets go round the sun, what sunspots are made of, why the water comes out of the tap – well, you gotta look at it. But sometimes you look at it, your looking changes it. Ya can’t know the reality of what happened, or what would’ve happened if you hadn’t-a stuck in your own goddamn schnozz. So there is no “what happened”? Not in any sense that we can grasp, with our puny minds. Because our minds… our minds get in the way. Looking at something changes it. They call it the “Uncertainty Principle”. Sure, it sounds screwy, but even Einstein says the guy’s on to something.

Let’s take a look at what Mr. Williams believed, and what may have lead him to such despair.

First of all, it’s important to say that I have no desire to mock this guy.  He’s an unemployed ex-felon who wanted to start a revolution.  He’s not the one with the power, is what I’m saying.  And no matter how misguided I find his views and actions to be, an AP report cites one of his main complaints as not being able to get a job.

“He hasn’t been able to get a job because he’s an ex-felon and nobody will hire him,” his mother also told the Chronicle, saying that he was unhappy with his continued unemployment and “what’s happening to our country.”

All that “what’s happening to our country” talk sounds a lot like “I want my country back,” a near-constant slogan used by Tea Party members — and it also sounds a lot like white paranoia.  That said, reports of Williams association with the Tea Party remains unclear, and I think is to a certain extent its beside the point.

Yes, the standard critiques probably apply here — the Limbaughs and the Becks and the FoxNewses of the world most likely stoked an irrational paranoia in Williams, leading him to believe that the ACLU (second only to ACORN on the Right’s most-hated list) was somehow a symbol of inequality and oppression in America.  But what’s more important is that this guy didn’t have a job.

I’m not excusing or justifying this guy’s behavior, clearly, but when people have no prospects and they believe that the government and corporations are in collusion against the general populace — a sentiment shared to differing degrees by grassroots movements on both the Right and the Left — they will lash out.

It’s not difficult to see why the poor in this country are desperate: our country’s already fragile safety net is ever decreasing, unemployment benefits are running out for millions, Social Security is constantly attacked, two wars and massive security state programs are running at incalculable costs, and the list goes on.  Regardless of Williams’ personal philosophy, these external circumstances can push people to extreme beliefs, extreme resentment, and extreme measures.  It’s important to remember why somebody is down and out before calling them crazy.

Honestly, all this talk of midterm elections is so dreary.  The President’s party almost always loses seats in the mid-term elections during his first term, especially when the economy is still shitty and unemployment is hovering around 10%.  Impose whatever convenient narrative you want to, that’s just a historical tendency in this country.  That’s why this quote, from McConnell, is so patently absurd.

“We shared your frustration. And we girded for the fight, confident that we had supporters behind us. We broke out of the Washington echo chamber and fought the government-driven solutions that Democrats were proposing. We got our groove back,” said McConnell

McConnell is so hip!  He then went on to promise that the GOP would, “do the right thing” because they have a “sixth sense” about “American Beauty.”  He did not say any of those things, but I’m getting word from staffers that his statement today will consist solely of him rapping the lyrics to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song while John Kyl beatboxes.

The researchers don’t mince their words:

“There has been an important, coherent and meaningful correlation between exposure to Vatican Radio’s structures and the risk of leukaemia and lymphoma in children,” the report said, according to the daily La Stampa.

The report also warned of “important risks” of dying of cancer for people who had resided at least 10 years within a nine-kilometre (5.5-mile) radius of the radio’s giant antenna towers near Cesano, some 20 kilometres north of Rome.

At least Vatican Radio has been pumping out the sweet rock and roll jams this whole time!  I love their Hour of Devotional Rock program, hosted by DJ Holy Fingers, who got his name by spinning Creed records and touching little boys.

Thankfully for the Vatican, Science has been working on ways to understand why shit actually happens (like why janky radio towers give kids cancer) for as long as Supernatural Thinking has been working to oppose that end.

The Vatican spokesman said the Holy See would soon publish its own experts’ conclusion in the case.

Expect them to conclude their radio towers were not to blame and stand by that position until 200 years later when they reluctantly admit they were actually wrong about all empirical claims they’ve ever made.  That seems to be the pattern, anyway.

TEL AVIV — An Israeli military investigation into its naval takeover of a Gaza-bound flotilla six weeks ago found that it was plagued by errors of planning, intelligence and coordination but the killings of nine Turks on board were justified, according to an official summary of the findings released Monday.

Numerous groups have called for an independent, international investigation, claiming that an Israeli-led inquiry would by definition be insufficient.    Yesterday’s report will likely do little to silence those critics, nor should it.

Israel rejected those calls.  Though the report does cite intelligence failures, it cleared the commandos — who killed 9 Turks, one of whom was an American citizen — of wrongdoing.

Oh god, here’s the transcript [via ThinkProgress]:

HANNITY: I have a hard time with the President’s, quote, “outreach” to the Muslim community in this way. When he spoke to the Muslim world, he didn’t talk about America’s contributions to Kuwait. He didn’t talk about America’s contributions to Kosovo. He didn’t talk about America’s contributions to Indonesia or Iraq. … I don’t hear America being praised enough by the Muslim world. Does the Muslim world give America the credit it’s due?

Follow the TP link above for a well-argued, sober response to Hannity’s babbling.  For my part, I’d just like to add one thought: YES, WHY ARE THEY SO CRAZY!?  THE WEST HAS BEEN SO GOOD TO THE MIDDLE EAST.

That is all.

It won’t surprise anyone that Brooks once again devoted the most valuable opinion-based real estate in the country to vagaries and platitudes.  That’s just what he does — it comes from giving an opinion despite having no intellectual standing in said field.  And since Brooks has no expertise in any field — and I mean that literally, not disparagingly or hyperbolically — he finds himself in the uncomfortable position of constantly opining on subjects which are simply beyond his grasp.  Imagine someone at a cocktail party who hasn’t seen Citizen Kane, but instead of owning up to it embarrassingly spews forth, “You know, what continues to impress me about the film is its raw power and imagery.  Though I don’t love it as much as some of the Italian films I’ve seen (Which ones? Oh, you know, the classics!) AFI was right to put it near the top of their 100 greatest films.  Really, the imagery is phenomenal!”

That’s what I hear in my head every time I read David Brooks.  It’s infuriating.  And today’s column — which can best be described as an attempt to set a Keynesian strawman ablaze with a damp match — is no different.  After describing that some pundits and policy-makers (which I’ll refer to as “Krugmans” for simplicity) believe the economy is still weak and would benefit greatly from increased stimulus spending, Brooks then simply dismisses that line of argument with a wave of his hand, without bothering to marshal any evidence at all that the Krugmans are wrong.  Brooks writes:

These Demand Siders [who I've been calling Krugmans - JK] have very high I.Q.’s, but they seem to be strangers to doubt and modesty. They have total faith in their models. But all schools of economic thought have taken their lumps over the past few years. [emphasis added.]

GAH.  It’s unforgivable that the New York Times editorial board allows this lazy, destructive, sophomoric over-generalization to pass as analysis.  This blunt tool that Brooks is employing — everyone was wrong so let’s just move on — is responsible (at least in part) for the most disgraceful episodes of the past 10 years. Iraq — everyone thought Saddam had WMDs, let’s move on.  Guantanamo Bay and indefinite detention — everyone was behind opening GITMO, and even if we don’t all love it, we have it now and we can’t just close it down.  The Housing Bubble — no one knew we were in a bubble (in fact, it is impossible to know when you’re in a bubble, says Greenspan!) and there was nothing that could’ve been done about it anyway.

The most consistent aspect of how our country operates now is to promote those pundits and policy-makers whose counsel has proven most incorrect in all aspects to the highest levels of power, and to dismiss those who saw the dangers and tried to raise the warning flag as shrill, unserious, and naive extremists.  But in every instance in which Brooks and his Centrist-loving (read: Corporate-loving) cohorts claimed everybody was wrong, there have been those who stood up to the powers that be when it wasn’t popular to do so.  Those on the left who opposed the Iraq war — especially on the grounds that we were staring down the business end of mushroom cloud — have been vindicated.  Those — like Joseph Stiglitz and Brooksley Born — who warned the real estate bubble would pop, with disastrous consequences, have been vindicated.  Those –  like Krugman — who said the stimulus was too small have been vindicated, even if the likes of Brooks are to stubborn or dim to understand it.  So, no, David Brooks, those who have “taken their lumps” over the past years have been the devotes Alan Greenspan and the School of Deregulation.

Brooks goes on to say, falsely, that, “the Demand Siders don’t have a good explanation for the past two years.”  Krugman responds — again, with admirable (coerced?) restraint — by writing, “I have no idea what he’s talking about when he says [that].”  Krugman goes on to note:

Funny, I thought we had a perfectly good explanation: severe downturn in demand from the financial crisis, and a stimulus which we warned from the beginning wasn’t nearly big enough. And as I’ve been trying to point out, events have strongly confirmed a demand-side view of the world.

The thing is, it’s clear that Brooks himself doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  Again, I mean this quite literally.  He doesn’t understand the subject about which he has chosen to write a column.  Take for instance this sentence, which sounds like a real sentence, but upon inspection reveals itself as pure nonsense.

Consumers are recovering from a debt-fueled bubble and have a moral aversion to more debt.

The distinction that has to be made here is a clear one, but one a casual reader may not be aware of.  See, the bubble was fuel by private debt, due to a lack of regulation that caused prices to inflate until the bubble popped.  The “more debt” that Brooks (again, falsely) claims Americans are averse to is government debt, used to jump start the economy to avoid extended stagnation.

There are two ways to interpret this sentence.  1) Brooks is speaking for the uneducated American who thinks that governments should operate like families — ie, tight one’s belt when times are tough; or 2) Brooks believes this sentence himself, thus betraying a fundamental lack of understanding of macroeconomic principles.  If we proceed with version (1), Brooks is simply incorrect about what it is Americans want.  In fact, 60% of the country wants increased government spending until the economy recovers.  Brooks loves to speak for Americans, but he hates to cite polls –  that’s not unique to him, it’s a common sickness among celebrity pundits.

If we go with option (2), then that means that Brooks doesn’t understand how counter-cyclical spending works, which is really impossible.  He must know the basics of Keynesian thought.  So, then, he’s either being purposefully deceptive or just plain lazy.  Either way, way to go, NY Times.

What really ticks Krugman off more than anything else, though, is Brooks unsurprising appeal to authority.  Brooks writes:

Moreover, the Demand Siders write as if everybody who disagrees with them is immoral or a moron. But, in fact, many prize-festooned economists do not support another stimulus. Most European leaders and central bankers think it’s time to begin reducing debt, not increasing it — as do many economists at the international economic institutions. Are you sure your theorists are right and theirs are wrong?

To which Krugman brilliantly responds;

Yes, I am. It’s called looking at the evidence. I’ve looked hard at the arguments the Pain Caucus is making, the evidence that supposedly supports their case — and there’s no there there.

And you just have to wonder how it’s possible to have lived through the last ten years and still imagine that because a lot of Serious People believe something, you should believe it too.

You also have to wonder how it’s possible that anybody would ever read David Brooks and think to themselves, “this guy is good.”  He is so bad.

Yesterday afternoon, Joe Klein of Time and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic are both accusing Glenn Greenwald, blogger at Salon, of comparing the invasion of Iraq to the Nazi Conquest of Europe.  As John Cole writes:

We’ve now got the spectacle of two prominent journalists, one for Time, one for the Atlantic, willfully misinterpreting someone’s remarks and screaming that person is a Nazi lover and hates America.

If you haven’t been following this story as it developed, don’t feel bad about being confused.  We only arrived at this point because Joey Joe Joe K and Jeffy G — two dinosaurs whose desperation to remain relevant bleeds through their words like India ink through tissue — have decided it’s best to barricade the castle door against the warriors at the gate: in this case, independent journalists.

Here’s the outline in a nutshell, working backwards chronologically.  Yesterday, Greenwald wrote a post titled “The universality of war propaganda,” in which he argued that just because some small part of an invaded country’s population benefits from the invasion, that doesn’t justify an aggressive war.  He writes:

It’s difficult to find an invasion in history that wasn’t supported by at least some faction of the invaded population and where that same self-justifying script wasn’t used.  That’s true even of the most heinous aggressors.

Greenwald advanced that argument in response to Jeffy’s claim that because the Kurds benefited from the Iraq invasion, that makes it morally sound.  Greenwald then documented numerous instances in which certain members of an invaded country cheered on that invasion, but went on to note:

It should go without saying, but doesn’t:  the point here is not that the attack on Iraq is comparable to these above-referenced invasions.  It may or may not be, but that’s irrelevant. The point is that every nation which launches even the most brutal, destructive and unprovoked wars of aggression employs moralizing propaganda to claim that their aggression engenders magnanimous and noble ends, and specifically often points to segments of the invaded population which welcome the violence and invaders.  Pointing to the happy and rewarded Kurdish minority no more justifies or legalizes the attack on Iraq than similar claims do for any of those other cases.

Glenn (rightly) anticipated that his words and arguments would be misinterpreted — either willingly or not — and so attempted with the above passage to head off any misplaced criticism off the bat.  Well, such “words” and “logic” are no match for Joe Klein folks.  He came back from vacation (stay, STAY) to launch a childish attack at Greenwald, distorting his argument in exactly the way Greenwald anticipated.

Greenwald–who, so far as I can tell, only regards the United States as a force for evil in the world–has laid out the incredible notion that the liberation of the Kurds, which Jeff celebrates (and so do I, and so do civilized people everywhere) as a happy byproduct of George W. Bush’s dreadful war in Iraq, can be compared to the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland…This is obscene.

Well, no, Joey Joe Joe, it isn’t.  The point, which Greenwald made explicit, is that wars of aggression are always justified by claiming a certain minority of the population benefited from the war.  Choose to argue that’s not the case if you so desire, Joey Joe Joe, but to hysterically wail about what a monster Greenwald is for making a comparison he explicitly didn’t make is absurd.

Then, as if to perfectly illustrate how the powerful circle the wagons to protect their own, Jeffy’s blog at the Atlantic screamed: Glenn Greenwald compares the Iraq war to the Nazi conquest of Europe.  It’s like a revolting game of battlefield telephone gone awry, on purpose.  Have Jeffy and Joey Joey Joe Joe even read Greenwald’s post?  Are they simply incapable of achieving high school levels of reading comprehension?  Or are they pissed off about something else, maybe.  Something, recent, and personal to them.

Here’s where the story goes from an important — though admittedly Inside Baseball-ish type  — of fight to a bit larger scale.  Earlier in Joey Joe Joe’s post about mean Greenwald, he also mentioned the Washington Post’s recent firing of Internet reporter Dave Weigel.  Joey Joe Joe calls the Post stupid for getting rid of him, and says he disagreed with his friend, Jeffy, who was happy to see Weigel go — at least initially (we’ll get to that later).  But Greenwald, who also disagreed with Jeffy, was so mean in his scathing, nay, blistering, nay, foot-print-leaving post criticizing Jeffy’s “analysis” of Dave Weigel’s resignation.  Why did he have to be so mean, Joey Joe Joe wants to know?

Greenwald also disagreed with Goldberg, but used the opportunity to launch another of his litigious, ambulance-chasing forays–in Greenwald’s case, it is “hits” he’s trying to collect, not fees–in which he posited Jeff as an arch-villain, practicing a form of dishonest journalism that Greenwald believes is corrupting the Republic.

Ambulance chaser!  Come on, now.  To understand that quote, we need to explain the Weigel situation as it relates to our current cast of characters.  Jeffy’s initial reaction upon hearing the Post had let go of a new, and by all accounts fantastic, reporter was to grossly talk about toilet training in a post that was dismissive and lazy.  Jeffy wrote, without a hint of irony:

The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training.

He later admitted that he was maybe wrong to opine about someone who he literally knew nothing about, but even in that post (as in his first) he cited no one but unnamed “friends” who told him what to believe and what to type out, like they new he would.  Greenwald, in typical fashion, took Jeffy to task for his atrocious “reporting” in the run-up to the Iraq war, as well as his willingness to turn his blog into a safe haven for his “friends” to disparage Weigel, whose reporting was actually well received by many on the Right.  Well, that little whipping might have stung a little — forcing the beast to stare at itself in the mirror may prove to be the only way to slay Medusa (or we may have to wait for decomposition to take its course) — and it’s not hard to imagine Jeffy taking any opportunity possible to strike back at Greenwald, no matter how intellectually bankrupt his weak return volley might be.  Joey Joe Joe’s distortion of Greenwald’s post gave Jeffy the perfect cover.

Speaking more broadly, Weigel’s almost unanimous support from the blogosphere, both liberal and conservative, speaks volumes about the gap between the old model of journalism and the new one — whatever this young, delicate lolita grows up to be.  I don’t get optimistic around here often, but there have been recent developments in journalism that deserve to be celebrated.  It’s a bit hard to articulate this (measured) optimism, somewhat like walking on stage and just knowing the crowd will be with you, but I can’t shake the feeling that there are enough good reporters out there who were so sickened by the run-up to the Iraq war that now, finally, we may be seeing a break in the old way’s facade.

Certainly Greenwald himself is at the center of this media reform — as well as journalists like Jeremy Scahill, and Matt Taibbi — and now we can add to that embarrassingly incomplete list: Michael Hastings.  His interview on CNN, along with Lara Logan’s, highlighted as clearly as possible the dichotomy between reporters who are inside and reporters who are outside.  Logan’s reprehensible performance laid bare where her alliances lay: with those she covers.  As Taibbi wrote:

Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn’t mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here’s CBS’s chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that’s killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag.

Hastings didn’t eat the story.  He held those in power accountable for their words and actions, trading (theoretically) future access for the story of the year.  Leave aside for the moment whether future access is valuable if you will still spike the story.  What Logan was advocating is that Hastings should have spiked the story because it reflected negatively on its subjects.  That is the role of the petty, grovelling stenographer: inform the King when he’s making a drunken ass of himself, and sit on the story so as not to embarrass the Empire.  Hastings, Greenwald, Scahill, Amy Goodman, and numerous others (some of whom even work at dying newspapers) are compelled by their conscience to attack those in power.  Your standard Washington Journalist is compelled by insecurity to do the opposite.

Consider this embarrassingly out of touch column by the Washington Post’s ombudsman concerning the Weigel firing. (It really deserves it’s own entry with the headline: WaPo ombudsman more out of touch than parents in Twisted Sister music video.)  He writes:

Weigel’s exit, and the events that prompted it, have further damaged The Post among conservatives who believe it is not properly attuned to their ideology or activities. Ironically, Weigel was hired to address precisely those concerns.

First of all, that’s not correct.  As I noted above, conservatives across the board didn’t have a problem with Weigel.  He just wasn’t a rabid, frothing culture warrior.  In fact, he called out the frothing fringe for what it was, but still defended Palin when he felt she deserved it.  But that’s not what the Post wanted.  They wanted, well, it’s not clear what they wanted.  But Andy the ombudsman doesn’t cite a single complaint about Weigel’s reporting.  Think about that.  A good, respected reporter turns in his resignation after a 24-hour media frenzy, and the paper doesn’t cite even one instance in which his so-called bias affected his reporting.  Andy concludes:

Alas, it took only one listserv participant to bundle up Weigel’s archived comments and start leaking them outside the group. The result is that Weigel lost his job. But the bigger loss is The Post’s standing among conservatives.

There is no mention of why, in and of itself, “The Post’s standing among conservatives” should be thought of as a good thing.  After attempting to sell access to its reporters at salons, the paper should be focused on trying retain any credibility as a newspaper.  Succumbing to right-wing fury is pathetic enough, but dressing it up as an attempt to correct an ideological blind-spot is simply inexcusable.

The Washington Post, like Joey Joe Joe, Jeffy, and Lara Logan see their role as those whose duty it is to maintain the status quo.  Those in power should be protected.  Those filthy barbarians clamoring at the gates need to be “toilet trained” to properly respect authority.  Established dichotomies — Left vs Right, Blogger vs Reporter, Serious vs Shrill — need to be protected at all costs.  There is a new crop of reporters and opinion writers who are challenging that model, and indeed have been for some time.  Hastings’ article is simply a dramatic illustration of what journalism can and should be, and that makes media insiders very nervous.  Little in America deserves to be celebrated more than that.