American Prospect Swirls the Drain

Some good news on a Monday morning, the American Prospect is swirling the drain.  For those unfamiliar with the Prospect, it is a far left fringe publication with a pedigree tracing back to Walter Duranty’s style of objectivity and the red-hued era of Hope and Change that many on the left had in the 1930’s.  And I mean the Henry Wallace/Popular Front version of Hope and Change as opposed to the milder FDR sort.

Intellectual heirs to Wallace now run the show at the Prospect.  It has been home to the snarky left.  Racialist hacks like Adam Serwer and shrill ideologues like Ezra Klein found a home there.  Naturally the Prospect was the perfect farm system for the Washington Post.  Like Dionne, Prospect writers and editors aren’t interested in accuracy, and don’t respond to calls for corrections.

Not surprisingly, the shrill ideologue E.J. Dionne is using his perch at the Post to try to save the American Prospect.  But why would the Post allow its pages to be used to save a competitor?

There you are mistaken, the Post and the American Prospect are competitors only to the naive.  For they are partners in the larger effort.  Dionne would rather have more voices competing with the Post, as long as those voices sound like his.  Profit isn’t the important part.  The Post will probably provide a lifeboat for many fleeing the sinking Prospect.

So let’s salute the demise of the American Prospect in the same way the rational celebrated the end of airline regulation, the 55-mile per hour speed limit, and best of all, the Soviet Union.