It’s a new Georgetown cocktail-party game: name the single stupidest piece to run in Fred Hiatt’s opinion pages this week. So many to choose from. After a week of colossal idiocies—for instance, running an editorial arguing that the Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to a martyr of the Green Revolution in Iran, when the terms of the prize require the recipient to be alive—Gawker asks the obvious question:
Under editor Fred Hiatt, the Post op-ed page has gone completely off the rails. They picked up Bill Kristol after the Times dumped him for being not just wrong but boring and lazy. They openly allow George Will to lie, to straight-up lie, without fact-checking or corrections, because we all know reality is open to different “interpretations” and if a prominent columnist writes something patently untrue the best response is to then publish a “true” column by someone else as a counterpoint, because that doesn’t just represent everything misleading and terrible about the moden political press. They still publish Richard Cohen. The regular columnists are, for the most part, interchangeable ancient “moderate” liberals who haven’t written or thought anything vaguely interesting since 1974. Anne Applebaum was allowed to publish a blog post in support of Roman Polanski without disclosing that her husband is Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who opposes extradition. Richard Cohen, again.
And David Broder doesn’t even get a mention! But maybe the question should be put differently. What did the reporters of the Post, who are plainly at the top of the profession, do to deserve such an embarrassing editorial page?
