Men Behaving Badly
Year-end and decade-end lists exist to argue with, so let me just say that Yglesias has his ranking of bad Post columnists wrong:
10. Michael Kelly
9. David Broder
8. Jim Hoagland
7. Robert Novak
6. Michael Gerson
5. Fred Hiatt
4. Robert Samuelson
3. George Will
2. Robert Kagan
1. Charles Krauthammer
I’d move Will down somewhat on the grounds he occasionally goes off-script. Gerson easily takes the top spot; the man preens. He is the most teeth-grindingly sanctimonious drip I can recall getting a regular column. Add the fact that he’s wrong about everything. Krauthammer is deeply evil, but every now and then he manages to be interesting at it. Far more often he’s at least exemplary of everything wrong with the elite consensus, while Gerson is only ever exemplary about I NEED TO STAB MY EYES OUT TO AVOID READING THE REST OF THIS COLUMN!!! Robert Kagan is a horrible fellow, but I feel like he benefits from the miasma of wrongness that is the Kagan family as a whole. It’s like that X-Files episode where Mulder, Scully and President Palmer find the house with the horrible inbreeds – you can’t really single out any one of them as the problem. I believe David Broder deserves a much higher rank than Matt gives him. Broder is supposed to be a genuine expert on practical politics, but he doesn’t seem to have any clue how politics is actually practiced today.
I hold no brief for Robert Samuelson, but for the good of UO I have to rate horribly destructive foreign-policy columnists ahead of one-note cheerleaders for state-capitalism, so move Jim Hoagland way up the list. Fred Hiatt is bad and dull and evil, but really; if you’re ranking supervillains and you’ve got Magneto in the top five, are you going to put the Terrible Toad within three slots of Magneto just because they work together? No. We already have Krauthammer on the short list. Hiatt deserves credit for the awfulness of the editorial page as a whole, but not as a columnist. He’s off the list.
Michael Kelly is dead, and has been for most of the decade. He was a bad, small-minded pundit, but he did have the guts to see his cockamamie adventure up close, and it killed him. He’s off the list too. Novak’s a hard case, but any man who gets declared "unpatriotic" by David Frum can’t be all bad. He’s off the list.
We have three spots to fill. I nominate: 1) Richard Cohen. This serial harasser shouldn’t even have a column in the Washington Post, having been chased out of town for going all Mad Men on the female staff. He’s that most annoying creature, the Fake Liberal. And I don’t find that his major subject – The Mind of Richard Cohen – merits that much regular attention. Plus, like Broder he’s pretty much a Post mascot; 2) EJ Dionne. Something about him just pisses me off. 3) David Ignatius. You’re thinking, "Come on, Jim, he’s already on the list." I respond, "No, you’ve confused him with Jim Hoagland." And you get a gotcha look in your eye and pounce! "By your own Fred Hiatt Rule, then, you can’t have both Hoagland and Ignatius on the list." But you are wrong. Consider the following proof: 1) You’re wrong. 2) I make the rules, not you. 3) We’ve been over this: Ignatius used to not be an idiot. A running theme of this blog for years was "WTF David Ignatius? In your first novel you skewered these neocon fools mercilessly and now you are one!" So, QED.
Final, corrected rankings:
10. EJ Dionne
9. Robert Kagan
8. Robert Samuelson
7. David Ignatius
6. George Will
5. Jim Hoagland
4. Richard Cohen
3. David Broder
2. Charles Krauthammer
1. Michael Gerson
Comment by SpaceSquid —
December 22, 2009 @ 6:28 am
Just to be pickly, the actor who played Sheriff Taylor in the X-Files episode you mention (which was called “Home”) was Tucker Smallwood, who was in fact neither President Palmer.
Comment by abb1 —
December 22, 2009 @ 7:44 am
Robert Novak was the only (or one of very few anyway) anti-Zionist mainstream pundit in the US. I nominate him to “the best and most courageous” list. Of the mainstream pundits, that is.
Comment by matthew h —
December 22, 2009 @ 8:32 am
“EJ Dionne. Something about him just pisses me off. ”
Despite the verbal departure, you’re still a libertarian after all. {sniff}
Comment by max —
December 22, 2009 @ 8:40 am
I actually think your list is better than Matthew’s given that Michael Gerson is number one.
max
['I'd quibble about Novak though.']
Comment by Greg —
December 22, 2009 @ 9:52 am
Samuelson ought to get a little credit for warning that the credit bubble was going to burst, even if only in a stopped clock is right twice a day sense. That’s still twice a day more than any other mainstream economics columnist managed.
Comment by Phillip J. Birmingham —
December 22, 2009 @ 11:22 am
To be fair, SpaceSquid, the first time I saw Dennis Haysbert, I thought “Hey, it’s Tucker Smallwood!”
Comment by is he covert or overt —
December 22, 2009 @ 3:53 pm
Ignatius
is he a covert or an overt cia agent / plant / stooge ????
and his novels are getting worser and worser … his last one was just awful.
Comment by Tom Jackson —
December 23, 2009 @ 11:51 am
I would argue that George Will deserves to be removed from the list, on the grounds that his column on why the U.S. should get out of Afghanistan is better than even anything Thoreau has written. Compare if you dare — the column is at tinyurl.com/l9a5lp.
Pingback by Making A List, Checking It Twice, Finding Out Whose Naughty And Nice « Around The Sphere —
December 23, 2009 @ 12:26 pm
[...] Jim Henley: I’d move Will down somewhat on the grounds he occasionally goes off-script. Gerson easily takes the top spot; the man preens. He is the most teeth-grindingly sanctimonious drip I can recall getting a regular column. Add the fact that he’s wrong about everything. Krauthammer is deeply evil, but every now and then he manages to be interesting at it. Far more often he’s at least exemplary of everything wrong with the elite consensus, while Gerson is only ever exemplary about I NEED TO STAB MY EYES OUT TO AVOID READING THE REST OF THIS COLUMN!!! Robert Kagan is a horrible fellow, but I feel like he benefits from the miasma of wrongness that is the Kagan family as a whole. It’s like that X-Files episode where Mulder, Scully and President Palmer find the house with the horrible inbreeds – you can’t really single out any one of them as the problem. I believe David Broder deserves a much higher rank than Matt gives him. Broder is supposed to be a genuine expert on practical politics, but he doesn’t seem to have any clue how politics is actually practiced today. [...]
Comment by Jesse Walker —
December 25, 2009 @ 10:48 pm
This exercise would be much better if it were expanded to include all the major newspapers. It feels weird that we’re even considering Will or Samuelson or Dionne in a world that contains Thomas Friedman, Peggy Noonan, and Maureen Dowd.
Comment by Jesse Walker —
December 25, 2009 @ 11:01 pm
As for Kelly, he was a more talented wordsmith than the average op-ed hack, I enjoyed several of his columns in the ’90s, and I think he did great work as an editor at The Atlantic (compare any issue under his tenure to any issue in the last year). I can’t speak to the quality of his Post columns in the decade now ending because I can’t actually recall reading any of them at the time. Someone in the Yglesias thread linked to one, and it was pretty bad, but even then not as bad many other ravings I saw on the same topic (see: The Corner), so it doesn’t stand out.
And yet here we are debating him as a serious contender when Thomas Friedman gets off scott free. C’mon: Let’s bring in the Times and Journal and see what the standings look like. Gerson will still be #1, but everyone else will have to slip down at least one position.
Comment by Jim Henley —
December 26, 2009 @ 10:42 am
I considered letting a few NYT columnists onto THIS list, with the idea that their badness was so monumental as to seep into other newspapers.