Charles Cooke of National Review Online critiques a recent pronouncement from a leading national newspaper.
We are drowning in nonsense. Here is an excerpt from the latest piece by Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post’s media correspondent:
“And, to be sure, the most important thing about Buzbee is not her gender. It has much more to do with how she’ll manage the journalistic challenges of this fraught moment in American history.
“A longtime Post subscriber in Virginia, one of my regular correspondents, had something to say about that in a recent email about the appointment: ‘Does she understand — really understand — that .?.?. the United States is on track to become functionally an authoritarian White Christian nationalist state in the very near future?” …
… This is sheer lunacy. It is gibberish. It is the sign of a diseased mind. And it matters, because it is being shared by Margaret Sullivan, who is not some random from Twitter, but the former public editor of the New York Times and the current media columnist for the Washington Post. That Sullivan considers these words to be worth spreading around is an indictment of her judgment and of her conception of the world around her.
This is not a left-right thing; it is a question of elementary sobriety. I get absurd emails all the time from people on the right whose grasp on political reality is either tenuous or non-existent. They tell me that the 2020 election was stolen. It was not. They share the QAnon conspiracy theory with me as if it were real. It’s not. They inform me about this or that plot to imprison them or declare martial law in Texas or abolish the U.S. Constitution in favor of a single global government. I read most of these emails, and, occasionally, I reply. But do you know what I don’t do? I don’t publish them in my column as if they are interesting or worthwhile or deserving of attention.
