Washington Post Goes Full Bigot

Hello. My name is Bob, and I’m a racist.

I know this because the editorial board of the Washington Post said so.

While I’m too young to have used water cannons on civil rights protesters, and couldn’t tell you where the local Klan meets (or if there even is one), I have this troubling problem of perspective. It is my inconvenient belief that a cabinet official with a high-level security clearance — the same access to much of the information provided to the CIA director — should avail herself of the same facts known to the rest of the cabinet, especially if she is going to be discussing a specific issue with the television press on a series of national television programs.

I do not remotely believe that Susan Rice was unaware that the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens was an act of terrorism. Ambassador Rice lied to the mainstream media and the American people, and she lied not just once, but in five appearances in a row. She continues to lie to this very day.

Quite a few in Congress feel the same way as I do about Rice’s overt dishonesty. But for voicing their displeasure with the ambassador’s lies, the Post tars them as racists, sexists, and neo-confederates to boot:

Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy. You’d think that before launching their broadside, members of Congress would have taken care not to propagate any falsehoods of their own.

The Post claims of Republicans that “we can’t know their hearts,” but assures us those hearts are sexist and racist all the same.

Oh, to have known this years ago, back when the Post thought I was newsworthy, and even asked me to guest blog for a short while. I didn’t know that for them it amounted to adventures in cracker-sitting.

I guess I should consider myself fortunate to have even appeared on their radar as an anthropological experiment, being a white, southern, public university graduate. It is not something of which the Post editorial board approves.

The Post editorial board, you see, is a thing of rare beauty and diversity.

Harvard-educated Fred Hiatt has been with the paper since 1981, as has Harvard-educated Lee Hockstader, Harvard-educated Stephen Stromberg, Harvard-educated Charles Lane, and Harvard-educated Opinions editor Marisa Bellack.

Yale-educated Jackson Diehl and Ruth Marcus are the Ivy League “outsiders.” Jo-Ann Armao, another white liberal, comes from the University of Buffalo, along with progressive cartoonist Tom Toles. Jonathan Capehart, the sole African-American on the board, shares the same diversity of thought as his colleagues. His difference from his peers is literally skin-deep, his individual editorials interchangeable with those of his peers in terms of view and substance.

There are no westerners, southerners, or Midwesterners on the Post editorial board, nor are there any libertarians, Republicans, or conservatives.

Most have been with the paper for decades. All are creatures of the Beltway, living inside the cocoon of  Washington, D.C., itself or in its wealthy suburbs, which are the richest in the nation. Hiatt himself lives in Chevy Chase, where the median family income is more than $200,000 per year, and the average home price is $855,000.

The Post editorial board is insular, isolated, and lock-step liberal in belief.

It is because of this narrow-minded elitist and conformist mindset that it could never cross the minds of the Post editorial board to consider that the dozens of congressional representatives and senators have a valid basis for doubting Ambassador Rice’s refusal to give a straight answer about the Benghazi attacks, wherein President Obama abandoned more than two dozen Americans under fire and denied cross-border authority to 100-plus Recon Marines attempting a rescue.

Because of this lock-step conformity, it would never cross their minds to question the motives of the Congressional Black Caucus, a relic of a bygone era that exists now only to seek and find Jim Crow and Bull Connor behind every thought and challenge to liberal orthodoxy. The CBC declares the presence of  racism yet again; who are the editors of the Post to question them?

James Taranto notes:

During Obama’s first term, the demonization of the “white male” was common among left-liberal commentators, especially MSNBC types. The Post has now lent its considerably more mainstream institutional voice to this form of bigotry.

The more likely truth is that the Post has always been filled with bigotry against the world outside their petri dish. They’ve just never felt as comfortable as displaying it as they do now, after the re-election of the post-partisan, post-racial president.

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image courtesy shutterstock / Nagy-Bagoly Arpad