David Broder of the Washington Post has long had his head so far up Washington’s ass that he is incapable of understanding that there are opinions in America beyond the ten Beltway insiders he gets his talking points from. (An affliction from which much of the D.C. press corps suffers, though generally not in as advanced a state as Broder’s.) In his latest column, he attacks writer John Judis for having opinions that Broder deems out of the mainstream — meaning anything to the left of, say, Senator Blanche Lincoln. Specifically, he endorses Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs’s recent criticism of “the professional left,” or those who are “prematurely finding fault with President Obama” for his failure to pursue reforms favored by liberal groups.
The column itself is a typical Broder snoozer, but what made it interesting was the addendum he tacked on lamenting the passage of Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, and Dan Rostenkowski, the former congressman from Chicago. Both, he said, “cultivated reputations for being tough, combative so-and-sos, but…were boon companions for a lot of us. “
Of course they were. Broder has no time to consider opinions more than a shade different than his own, but he’s “boon companions” with a corrupt former chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means who did prison time and with Stevens, who was just as crooked but was spared prison due to the bungling of prosecutors.
