At this point, I figured I’d said all I could possibly say about my disgust with (and embarrassment for) The Washington Post. Granted, they keep finding new ways to distinguish themselves as a once respectable establishment that has let the rot and refuse festering within turn the whole product rancid. But once one cancels his lifelong subscription and writes a few scathing blogs about it, it’s best to move on to more pertinent things. After all, it’s not as though The Post has stooped so low as to let Sarah Palin disgrace the Op-Ed page.
Oh.
Really? Are you not kidding? At what point do we wake up from this nightmare, or when does someone admit that the last few months have been a joke; an experiment designed to measure the limits of what the public could possibly believe? Can anyone actually tolerate this level of desperation mixed with callow opportunism?
Well, I guess in all fairness, it’s not as though Palin actually wrote this thing. I mean let’s get real.
And it’s not because the piece is (for the most part) grammatically sound; it’s that it predictably and methodically clicks off the Republican talking points, one after another, on the whole “cap and trade” issue. I’m sure there will be plenty of worthwhile retorts infiltrating the interwebs; here is Conor Clarke laying the smack down succinctly, and definitively. Money quote, below:
Just one more point about Sarah Palin’s op-ed in this morning’s Washington Post: the piece does not contain the words pollution, emissions, carbon, or global warming. As Derek says, this is a bit like an op-ed on health care that doesn’t contain the words spending, costs, coverage, or medicine, or a high-school paper on Catcher in the Rye that doesn’t contain the words, um, Catcher in the Rye.
I find this absence sickening. Deciding how to deal with climate change is an uncertain and complicated process. It requires weighing costs in the present against benefits a hundred years in the future. It requires weighing costs in the U.S. against benefits in places like India and Bangladesh. It requires weighing concrete GDP against the moral emphemera of the world’s floral and animal diversity. And it requires sacrificing today to ward off uncertain and unquantifiable future risks. This tremendous empirical uncertainty demands reflection and humility.
And then you have Sarah Palin show up, blathering about how we’re “destroying America’s economy” while we’re “literally” sitting on mountains of oil and drill baby drill and blah blah blah. Sickening.
It would be appalling (and yes, amusing) enough if The Post had the temerity to provide the Op-Ed megaphone to any Republican on any issue related to the environment; but then, you’d think the same thing regarding any issue related to health care, finance or foreign affairs. And as we know, Das Post is not only safe haven for Neo Cons and GOP nut jobs, it is practically their own private country club at this point.
But to enable this disgraced and disgraceful sham of a simpleton to have a public platform, on this of all topics? It staggers the mind. Truly.
I’m no longer asking what has happened to this newspaper’s integrity; it’s a matter of what the next outrage will be. Kind of like Bluto Blutarski, they are rolling, and it might be time to cease being surprised. Their soul may have gotten sucked into that black hole, but going forward, there should be some hilarious wreckage crashing to earth. Stay tuned.
Incidentally, and speaking of Cygnus X-1 (Book One): for the skinniest, dorkiest, whitest man who has ever strapped on a bass guitar, Geddy Lee is a certifiably BADASS MOTHERFUCKER.
Bonus footage. Have to send a shout out to this dude, who seems to have put in the time to actually be able to play along (convincingly!) to the studio version (which, to be honest, is 100x better than the still impressive live version above). Get some!
