No Shortage of Teh Stupid

Apparently, the Wah!Poo (aka the Washington Post) has decided to fire Dan Froomkin, one of the best journalists I've found over the past decade or so. To add salt to the wound, they decided to give Paul "Wolfie" Wolfowitz, that neocon hustler schmuck, proven liar, and known war criminal, a guest column this weekend, probably with intent to hire.

What's really interesting about the firing of Froomkin and the hosting of Wolfie is how many people have had a strong reaction thereto. I was very upset and depressed about it yesterday, but after visiting their ombudsidiot's bleagh (just like a blog, only stupider and more pointless) today, found what seemed like at least one thousand angry comments, many from subscribers who've taken the Wah!Poo for decades and swear they will no more.

Whatever. I wrote Dan a thankyou for his terrific work — some days it seemed like he was the only thread of sanity, during the horrible Bush years. And then, because I couldn't resist, I went to the ombudsidiot's bleagh and added a dollop of snark along these lines:

I left here yesterday determined never to return, but was intrigued by a link in a blog I read regularly about the "700 comments" on the firing of Froomkin. I'm glad I swung by for a quick look. It seems as if the number of comments on this page is now a thousand or more. And many, many people share my sentiments about the inappropriateness of, on the one hand, firing Froomkin who exercised true journalistic even-handedness in speaking truth to power, and, on the other, giving column space to yet another tired neocon war criminal and known liar, Wolfowitz. And now that Jane Hamsher has the stats on Wah!Poo readership, it looks as if The Huffington Post is not just drinking your milkshake, but eating your lunch as well. Shoot, it's even sweeping up all the crumbs for later dispersal to the birds. I admired and respected the Washington Post of Katie Graham, although I never agreed with its politics. It was a good paper, though, and earned its laurels. What Fred Hiatt and the Graham scion have done with it leaves it barely fit for fishwrap. Goodbye again, Wah!Poo. Judging from the figures, you'll soon be part of teh Moonie Times anyway.

Feel free to express your wrath, if any, here. If you want to say goodbye to Dan, you'll find him here for another week or so. He's promised to let his readership know where he'll land, and land he will, gracefully, on both feet. It's the Wah!Poo's loss, not his. Their current stable of Op-Ed writers (and stable is an apt term, given the horses' asses they house) includes such non-luminaries as Charles Krauthammer (vile, spittle-flecked, reality-insensible torture-loving neocon); Ramesh Ponnuru (the less said the better); Bill Kristol (fired by the NYT for a tragic divorce from fact); George Will ("teh global warming of my blue jeans, it is teh drama"); and David "You peasants don't need to know that the X industry paid me to tell you Y" Broder; and, who knows, Rush Limbaugh next, unless Wolfie takes the job.

In the meantime, you can find Dan's writing at Nieman Watchdog. If you're a regular reader of Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon, or any of the big blogs like Firedoglake, HuffPo, Daily Kos, TPM, and the like, there's plenty of lively discussion going on about the issue. Is the Wah!Poo circling the toilet, or already in teh shit?

Mainly, what I'm wondering is, would it be worthwhile to subscribe to the Wah!Poo just to cancel one's subscription on the day Dan leaves? You know, just to really drive home the point that lotsa lotsa people think they're truly well beyond fucked up and, as Molly Ivins used to say, not being driven out of business by the Internet so much as committing suicide like a drunken lemming on crack. But I paraphrase.

Whatever. There isn't room for two reactionary birdcage liners in the city of Washington, D.C., so chances are they're, as some commenter said on Sadly, No!, presenting like a female mandrill in heat in the hope of being acquired by the true neocon schmatta, the Washington Times, affectionately (no, sorry, truthfully, rather) known as The Moonie Times.

Stumble It!