Brad DeLong, summing up the inadequacies of the press corp:
“I have not yet figured out why so much of our elite press is so… what should I call it? Feckless. Corrupt (in the sense of well-rotted). Decadent. Why does William Saletan find it funny that Kerry tries hard to give nuanced, reasonably-complete answers to questions about issues with nuances? Why do Weston Kosova and Michael Isikoff cover the government — rather than, say, cover something like advances in bartending — if they find debates over policy the equivalent of crossing the Gedrosian Desert? Why does Michiko Kakutani think it pointless and boring to wake up early to watch the inauguration of the first democratically-elected president in sixteen years in a country of 130 million people?”
Incidentally, even the best of the British media are not immune on this score. In his Panorama interview with Clinton, David Dimbleby persisted with questions about the Lewinsky affair. Clinton’s reply was, I think, devastating:
“Look, you made a decision to allocate your time in a certain way, you should take responsibility for that, you should say Yes, I care much more about this than whether the Bosnian people were saved, and whether he brought a million home from Kosovo [or] than whether we moved a hundred times as many people out of poverty as Reagan and Bush.”
Russell Beattie, in the midst of reading Clinton’s My Life: “Are autobiographies just after-the-fact weblogs?”