As you may have heard, Amazon Chief and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has decided to pull an Elon Musk and grab ankles for the pleasure of his all-conquering Jefe, El Donaldo, even before Trump is in the White House. Because after Trump is in the White House, he’s going to remember, all too well, all the people so disgusting as to have opposed him, and Jeff is gettin’ on the Trump Train while the gettin’s good!
Sewell Chan, over at the Columbia Journalism Review, has the gory details of Bezos’ cowardly surrender, telling how two members of the Post’s editorial staff were putting the finishing touches on an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, which, given the Post’s endless denunciations of Trump stretching over the past eight years, could only have come as a serious non-event. Now, of course, it’s the supposed “non-event” that has exposed the utter spinelessness of Jeff “Rocket Man” Bezos, along with his hand-picked editor and publisher, William Lewis, aka “the Puppet”.
And so the Washington Post has decided that, well, it’s tired of telling its readers what to think (that’s a first) and so now, out of the goodness of its heart, it’s going to let them make up their own minds all by themselves. At least that’s the story that Bill has to tell, but a lot of people at the Post are calling bullshit, and a lot of people who subscribed to the Post, like me, have cancelled their subscriptions.
Over at the Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last has a prescient take, arguing that the “real” story is not the cowardice of the Post, but that of its owner. The richest, “most powerful” men in America have already sold out to Trump, realizing that, once in power, he will simply do whatever he wishes, regardless of what the Constitution or anyone else says, and Devil take the hindmost, as He undoubtedly will.
I think these billionaire cowards—and I include semi-billionaire coward Jamie “Whore” Dimon in this list—are “correct” in this analysis, though a Democratic Congress, or even Democratic control of one House of Congress, could slow Trump down a bit. The “hope” that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts could suddenly grow a spine is a wan one indeed. I think it more likely that Roberts would decide, “sadly”, “Well, they asked for it, and so they are going to get it. Not my responsibility, that’s for sure!”
So, yeah, Last gets it right in his take on the Billionaires Whores Club, but I think his remarks on the significance of the Post’s supposed non-decision—“Everything about this story feels like a tempest in a teapot, a boiling story about legacy media fretting over itself in the mirror”—is seriously off.
I think this is the end of the Washington Post. Benjamin Wittes, also writing at the Bulwark and a former member of the Washington Post editorial page staff, has a much longer and understandably more bitter take, but I think even Wittes understates the matter. There is no reason to respect anyone who remains in a leadership position at the Post anymore. No newspaper ever prided itself as much on its willingness to speak truth to power, and now the Post kneels before the most corrupt man in American history. If the Washington Post can’t summon up the nerve to say that Donald Trump should not be president, it can’t be trusted to get anything right.
Afterwords
I have to say that I was much less enamored of the Washington Post’s editorial page in what Wittes’ imagines to have been its “heyday” under the late Fred Hiatt (d. 2021), whose memory Wittes reveres. Hiatt, in my sour opinion, was a thorough-going hypocrite, who often deliberately lied to his readers in order to fool them (so he hoped) into accepting essentially Likudist policies, always asking himself, but never his readers, “Is It Good for Israel?”
Back in August 2019, for example, the Post’s editorial board gave us this: “Trump risks turning a chance for success in Afghanistan into a shameful failure” (as if there were ever a chance of “success” in Afghanistan), that included this deliberate lie regarding the presidency of Barack Obama:
Mr. Trump’s politically motivated zeal resembles that of Mr. Obama, who in 2011 insisted on a full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, ignoring warnings — later tragically proved correct — that it could lead to the resurgence of jihadist movements there.
In fact, Obama was simply doing what he had to do, in obedience to the “status of forces” agreement signed by George Bush, requiring U.S. withdrawal at the end of 2011. Mr. Hiatt, and the rest of the “gang” at the Post knew this, of course, but they were so in love with the “Obama was a coward, and cowards never win” meme that they couldn’t resist pillorying Barack with it every chance they got.
The cherry on top of Mr. Hiatt’s hypocrisy sundae had already been provided by his earlier (June 2019) “Opinion” piece, run under his own name—perhaps because it was too toxic for anyone else on the “board”—which bore the repulsive title “We knew who Trump was but elected him anyway. We can’t impeach him for that.”, arguing against impeaching Trump for demanding that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy announce an investigation into Joe Biden and then illegally withholding congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine when Zelenskyy didn’t come through as Trump had “ordered”.
Hiatt acknowledges that Trump was a bad guy and that the Post had said back in 2016 that he should not be allowed near the White House: “We thought his unfitness was evident before he was elected, and Americans chose him anyway. (No, he didn’t win the popular vote. But he won.)”
Uh, uh. If he didn’t win the popular vote—and in fact he lost it by close to 3 million votes—then the American people didn’t “choose” him. He “won” via the deliberately unrepresentative Electoral College.
It gets worse. Effectively, Hiatt’s “argument” is that the voters had to know that, in effect, Trump would be committing high crimes and misdemeanors at the drop of a hat, so, in effect, they got what they wanted and, somehow, Congress has no right to exercise its own judgment in the matter, even though the Constitution specifically gives it the impeachment power, which it can use on any president it chooses, regardless of the circumstances of his/her election—kind of a “three independent branches of government” thing if you believe in the Constitution, which I’m not sure Hiatt did, because it’s almost as if Hiatt wanted Trump to be a dictator—as long as didn’t act like that sissy faggot Barack Obama, that is. As long as Trump was “good” for Israel—and by Hiatt’s Likudist standards, of course, Trump was good for Israel—well, then, the Constitution be damned. If anything, Trump had Hiatt more securely in his hip pocket than he has Bezos now.
There was always plenty of neocon nonsense available both on and off the Washington Post’s editorial page back in the day, but after its most recent fiasco—accepting—nay, participating in—the collapse of constitutional government in the United States—I think this is the end. The Post was in mortal distress from the early days of the internet and was saved from collapse only by Bezos’ purchase of the paper in 2013. I chronicled the Post’s pre-Bezos agony in some detail, which you can read here if you like. I canceled my subscription early in the oughties, when the Post was still pushing the dead-tree version, but the paper—desperate to maintain circulation, I guess—kept sending me copies for years to come. I re-upped when Bezos bought the paper but now I’m out again. Even at 79, I strongly suspect that I will outlive the Post. Sad!
ADDENDUM—Why I’m cancelling my subscription to the Washington Post as well as Amazon Prime
There are, naturally, a lot of people who think I should only be cancelling Amazon Prime and not the Washington Post as well. After all, WashPost Publisher and CEO William Lewis was simply doing Jeff Bezos’ bidding here. Jeff is the real villain, isn’t he?
Well, sort of. Actually, we have two villains, Jeff and Will. It’s pretty clear that Jeff chose Will to be, in effect, a villain, and he certainly got one. Every word of Lewis’ post, “On political endorsement”, referenced above, is a lie. Will Lewis is not a journalist; he is a hustler. He will do, and say, anything to advance his case. And his case is Donald Trump. The editor and CEO of the Washington Post is doing his level best to destroy the First Amendment.
Nineteen Washington Post columnists have called Lewis’ announcement “a serious mistake”. As I have said, it is not a mistake; it is a lie. If the rank and file at the Washington Post have done anything in an organized manner to protest Lewis and his repulsive hypocrisy, I have not heard of it. If Trump is elected, I have no reason to believe that the Post will report the news fairly.
As has been extensively reported elsewhere, the Post has been in a downward spiral ever since Biden’s election assured people that the world wasn’t going to Hell. It’s no wonder that the people at the Washington Post aren’t willing to stick their necks out for the First Amendment if it’s going to cost them their job. But if the Post isn’t going to be willing to stick its neck out for the First Amendment with Trump in the White Housse, what good is it?
Perhaps Post people will give a good reason to renew my subscription. But right now, with Will Lewis in charge, the Post is simply not a publication I can respect. I’ll be revisiting this issue, but as for now, it’s thumbs down for both Amazon Prime and the Post.
Jonathan V. Last, whom I mentioned earlier, has another painfully excellent post related to this issue, Bezos, Trump, and the Failure of Democracy.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank explains why you shouldn’t cancel your Post subscription.
