Hiatt Held Hostage?

by digby

Jane gives Fred Hiatt a righteous fisking for his surreal editorial in the Washington Post today and I am appalled at her insensitivity.

Has it occurred to any of these critics that Hiatt may have been taken hostage by Bushian insurgents? The discordant almost drunken tone can only lead one to the conclusion that this editorial was coerced. It wanders so far from the facts that you have to figure that some sort of dark forces were at work in producing such an bizarre and disconcerting cataloging of lies and misapprehensions. Indeed, you would almost think that Hiatt went out of his way to signal that he was writing this editorial under duress — kind of like that POW who blinked morse code in that North Vietnamese propaganda film. He had to know that discerning readers would guess that he couldn’t be serious considering that the very day it was published his own paper was reporting the facts entirely differently. He’s actually quite fiendishly clever.

Still, although Hiatt’s abduction and strongarmed editorial may be patently obvious to you and I, like many members of the leftist fever swamp, Josh Marshall also unfairly takes the Post editorial board at face value without even granting that they might have been forced by their Republican captors to write what they wrote:

For whatever reason, the Post has chosen to throw in its lot with the flurry of mendacious rhetoric and the white-washed investigations, all of which amount to a grand pen and paper and word game truss barely holding together the body of official lies that is still barely governing the capital.

They’ve made their deal with power. They should justify it on those grounds rather than choosing to mislead their readers.

Sure. Jump to that conclusion with nothing to go on except the facts. Can’t he see that this ludicrous editorial can only be the result of a villianous threat of violence?

I understand that some readers are complaining to the Post directly. One hates to so to see the unwashed public take their betters to task like that. I certainly hope that they start deleting comments right away. These people have no sense of decorum. Let’s hope Howie Kurtz and Deborah Howell can teach these barbarians a little something about showing a little sensitivity to those brave souls who go out to Pennsylvania Avenue to get the good news —- and never come back.

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