WaPo Hazel Shocked to discover

That it’s not 1952 anymore.

First this squishy apology from Deborah Howell.

The Firestorm Over My Column
By Deborah Howell
Sunday, January 22, 2006; B06

Nothing in my 50-year career prepared me for the thousands of flaming e-mails I got last week over my last column, e-mails so abusive and many so obscene that part of The Post's Web site was shut down.
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I wrote that he gave campaign money to both parties and their members of Congress. He didn't. I should have said he directed his client Indian tribes to make campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.

My mistake set off a firestorm. I heard that I was lying, that Democrats never got a penny of Abramoff-tainted money, that I was trying to say it was a bipartisan scandal, as some Republicans claim. I didn't say that. It's not a bipartisan scandal; it's a Republican scandal, and that's why the Republicans are scurrying around trying to enact lobbying reforms.

But there is no doubt about the campaign contributions that were directed to lawmakers of both parties. Records from the Federal Election Commission and the Center for Public Integrity show that Abramoff's Indian clients contributed money to 195 Republicans and 88 Democrats between 1999 and 2004. The Post also has copies of lists sent to tribes by Abramoff with his personal directions on which members were to receive what amounts.

Michael Crowley of the New Republic said in his blog that "while for all practical purposes this is indisputably a Republican scandal, the narrow liberal-blogger definition of whether any Democrats took money 'from Abramoff' -- which neatly excludes contributions he directed his clients to make -- amounts to foolish semantics.''

These facts have been reported many times in The Post and elsewhere. So why would it cause me to be called a "right-wing whore" and much worse?

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But it is profoundly distressing if political discourse has sunk to a level where abusive name-calling and the crudest of sexual language are the norm, where facts have no place in an argument. This unbounded, unreasoning rage is not going to help this newspaper, this country or democracy.

I didn't ask washingtonpost.com to shut down an area reserved for comments about me, as it did on Thursday night. And I know the decision is being greeted with great disdain.

Jim Brady, editor of the Web site, said that when the site was set up, "there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being. It's a shame that it's come to this."
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Ok, Ms. Howell, since you are apparently new to these shores and this century, let me explain.

You toe-danced into the middle of a minefield and you should damned well have known better. Either you’re just not very bright – which doesn’t seem to be the case – or you have been living in a culturally hermetically sealed bubble that makes a JPL clean room look like a Park District locker room after a Friday Night pie-eating and poo-flinging contest.

You see, once upon a time there was a very Bad Party called The Republicans. They had some good ideas, but got such a priapistic hard-on (that’s "crude, sexual language" for a painful, perpetual male erection in this case symbolically sported by Neocons who who want to fuck the Constitution. To death.) for winning at any cost that they invited some of the filthiest, most loathsome groups in this nation into their electoral Big Tent.

Ever since that decision was taken, the GOP has grown more and more dependent on these groups for their razor-thin margins of victory.

The hallmark traits of these groups are hatred, fear and an arrogant, oozing, bone-deep stupidity. Berserk hatred of blacks. Jews. Liberals. Environmentalists. Groups that defend civil liberties. Hysterical hatred of gays.

Seething hatred for intelligent and independent women such as I’m sure you believe yourself to be.

And because the GOP has grown as helplessly dependent on them for victory as any junkie depends on his dealer, the inevitable has happened: the heirs of Jefferson Davis and all the rest of Conservative Children of the Corn are now no longer simply and recklessly pandered to. These hucksters and bigots and pinheads have taken over the Republican Party, wholly and outright, and one important pillar of their takeover of the Party – and the country – has been the creation of a vast, malignant propaganda machine to feed back to them the lies they want to hear.

As the Terri Schiavo Debacle clearly demonstrated, for hurricanes, tsunamis and the grieving mother of a dead soldier, the Bicycle Chief could not be bothered to interrupt his important pursuit of his brush-clearing merit badge… but when James Dobson snaps his fingers, George W. Bush obeys.

And as the new owners of the GOP have gotten louder, crazier and more viciously partisan, the voice of the mainstream media – such as the WaPo – has gotten weaker, pussier and more attenuated. Again and again the mainstream media has failed spectacularly in its job to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Year after year we on the Left have looked to people like you to take on the rise of an explicitly and radically anti-democratic religious cult to political prominence. And years after year the mainstream media has steered a blind course towards a wholly imaginary “Middle”, without any recognition that while the Left has grown more Centrist, the Right has gotten positively Stalinist…so that the Middle that you reflexively covet is now several thousand miles to the Right of where Barry Goldwater used to stand.

This is frankly because the main stream media is lazy, and instead of reporting loudly and clearly (to take one recent and obvious example) that Creationism is arrant, superstitious nonsense, we hear about the “controversy”.

There. Is. No. Controversy.

And the illusion of such controversies only exist because Conservatives figured out about 30 years ago that all they have to do is keep staking out positions that are further and further Right and screaming about a non-existent liberal bias…and you will all continue to automatically and reliably shamble to the Right, ceding them half the field, and then half of what remains, and then half again, while you pretend to call it “balance”.

They know that because the mainstream media no longer has any fixed star by which they navigate, you will go where they herd you.

So why did you get the chamberpot emptied on your head?

The fact that you are perplexed by the public reaction to your “mistake” shows that if you are not unqualified to ombudsman the Post by virtue of partisanship, you are ludicrously ill-equipped for the job of overseeing a journalistic enterprise based on the degree to which you must be completely out of radio contact with reality to even ask such question.

The reason you got shat upon is simply that we on the Left are tired of you in the MSM letting the Fox/Rush/Robertson/Hannity/CNN/Dobson/DeLay Republican Lie Machine get away with murder.

We’re tired of you pooh-poohing the barbarians at democracy’s gate as being annoying rabble instead of being a clear and present danger to our country.

We’re tired of a former Vice President (who was cheated out of his rightful office) making a major policy address and having it almost completely ignored.

We’re tired of you bending over and grabbing your ankles for liars and thugs and traitors.

We’re tired of finding out that – as we long suspected – far from being crusading truth-seekers, the likes of Judith Miller and Bob Woodward openly stooge for this Administration.

That the Bush White House’s open, sneering contempt for the Free Press is greeted by the Free Press, not as one Hell of an Important Story in and of itself…but with pliant taint kissing. Rolling over. Selling out principles for “access”. The shrugging acceptance of a creature like Manwhore Jeff Gannon in the WH Press Room. Planted stories. Payola and journalists for hire.

We were tired of seven years of screaming headlines and impeachment over trivia when the President is a Democrat, but would have swallowed it if it hadn’t been followed immediately by five years of stupefyingly conspicuous silence over a Republican Administration that fairly brags on the air in prime time about its crimes, both High and Low.

For the last 20 years – since the beginning of the collapse of genuine, investigative journalism in the United States, the death of the Fairness Doctrine and the Rise of Rush – we have seen the Right use the tools of mass media to wage a relentless and ruthless war on very idea of democracy and of free and fair press.

We have seen them lie and lie and lie and lie.

Slander and slime and fill the air with white-hot, pig-ignorant rage and we have seen the mainstream media do…nothing.

We have waited and waited for those who are most protected by the First Amendment to rouse themselves from their ivory towers and incestuous entanglements with Power and rise up to defend the noble document from which that protection is derived.

And now we are tired of waiting.

Where there should be a robust and free press – where the likes of Edward R. Murrow or Mike Royko (who I understand each might have actually used that terrible, pee-pee, ka-ka, scatalogical language that seems to horrify you so) once stood lively guard -- there is gaping hole though which the wingnut Visigoths are pouring.

You have hobbled off the field of battle, feebly abandoning your Washington post at the moment the public most needed you to be fearless and strong, and we are through waiting for you to distinguish your asses from your elbows and figure out what's up.

We’re through with this being a one-sided joust.

It’s too bad your remarks blundered you into a firestorm that you apparently were unaware even existed, but frankly how can we take that as anything but further confirming evidence of how sadly, institutionally out of touch you have become.

So now you know: This is what the future looks like. A place where every fucking time a representative of the “objective” mainstream media opens their mouth and sloppiness or ignorance comes burbling out --and the results of that laziness just so happens to redound to the advantage of the corrupt and criminal Right -- expect the fucking wrath of God to come down on your head, studded with both well-articulated rebuttals and assorted potty words that you may need to go here to translate (site not work-safe.)

Speaking only for myself, I accept your apology as genuine and in that spirit, let me offer you a bit of advice:

The easygoing days of the Left courteously letting this shit slide while the Right shells us 24/7 and the MSM shrugs and tries to pretend that both sides are equally culpable are over, Ms. Howell.

Welcome to the 21st Century where, if you want to keep the title of Ombudsman for a major American newspaper and avoid another public shellacking, you can either catch up, join up and bone-up, or you can damn well shut the fuck up.