David Broder for War Czar

By Scott Horton

As my colleague Ken Silverstein relates, the Washington Post pulled out all the stops trying to find someone to back up David Broder in his claims about Harry Reid and came up empty handed. David Broder wrote that Democrats were “lined up” seeking Reid’s departure. It turned out that there were no Democrats at all in that line, and the only senator in the line, James Inhofe, spent Friday telling the press that they had invented the entire WMD issue in the lead up to Iraq, a line almost as good as his expression of pride in being called a holocaust-denier.

Broder’s original piece was typical of his oblique style—instead of saying that Reid had spoken inartfully (which would have been a tenable position), Broder stakes out a position which is all his own, and then attributes it to “others”—Broder’s fantasy menagerie. Today, after being exposed as wrong, Broder insists in an interview with Editor & Publisher that he’s sticking to his guns. But this is exactly what Broder’s readers expect of him—he is almost always wrong, and he generally refuses to change his view, even when starring his errors in the face.

Frankly, the readers of the Washington Post deserve better than this—indeed, the entire country deserves better. Moreover, Broder has missed his obvious calling. Stephen Hadley is desperately hunting for an Iraq War Czar. Who could be better qualified for this post than David Broder? He commands unflinching respect within the entire pundit class, and reality, for him, consists of the gibberish uttered by his pundit brethren. He is perfectly qualified for the job.