I’m planning on curtailing my fixation with the Kaplan editorial page. It’s one of my New Year’s resolutions. But in the meantime I cant resist discussing Matt Yglesias’s list of top ten worst Washington Post columnists of the decade:
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
Atrios rightly suggests replacing Michael Kelly with Richard Cohen. But I’d take this one step further: Cohen deserves to be number 1. His algebra and “better with the lights off” were probably the two worst columns I have ever read in my life.
Moreover, it’s too stacked against right-wingers. I’ll grant Gerson and Kagan, but Krauthammer is only marginally worse than David Brooks and not as bad as Bill Kristol (both of whom have had Times gigs). Likewise, George WIll is not as bad as John Tierney. And Hoagland is better than Tom Friedman. The list should focus on what is makes the WaPo editorial page bad compared with other papers so I propose a severe reshuffle with some new names
10. Charles Krauthammer
9. George Will
8. Anne Applebaum
7. David Broder
6. Michael Gerson
5. Jackson Diehl
4. Fred Hiatt
3. Robert Kagan
2. Robert Samuelson
1. Richard Cohen
Update. The idea is that Kristol and Palin haven’t written enough in WaPo yet to make the list. If we were to make a list of the worst irregular/one-off columnists, it would start
1. Palin
2. Kristol
3. Amity Shlaes
4. Steve Landsburg
5. Kevin Hassett
bailey
Krauthammer only marginally worse than Brooks? Insane. Krauthammer is pure evil, and Brooks is more just banal.
Emma
Jesus Christ. Looking at all the names in a row like that (either list) is absolutely obvious that the WaPo is heading for the trashcan of journalism history.
arguingwithsignposts
I’ll just leave a little smudge here.
I did like the commenter who noted:
NobodySpecial
@bailey:
Krauthammer at least in his latest column admits he’s a dope. Brooks is serious!
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@bailey:
Remember Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” though. The banality of evil is often more frightening and damaging than a purified distillation of sadistic evil.
mistermix
Cohen as #1 is richly deserved. He’s despicable personally and professionally, unlike Krauthammer.
Comrade Mary
@arguingwithsignposts: KITTEH!
Right. Feel better now.
jeffreyw
@bailey: Brooks is Eddie fucking Haskell
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
The scary things about that list is that in terms of professional habits (not ideology), pretty much everybody on the list would have been quite comfortable and successful working for Pravda.
Mike E
Technically not a column, but no Sarah Palin?
Sentient Puddle
@Mike E: Yglesias’s criteria for ranking was this:
By that yardstick, you’re right. I have no idea how Sarah Palin isn’t #1.
EdTheRed
That’s a better list than Yglesias’. Seriously, Cohen’s lights out column was perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever read by a regular WaPo columnist. His “let Roman Polanksi free, but first let me at him” column was epically failtastic, too.
And let us not forget his belief that torture makes us safer.
Or his classic Obama-Farrakhan concern troll column.
And Applebaum makes the list on the strength of her Polanski-defending column where she failed to mention her Poland-sized conflict of interest alone. The rest of her body of “work” is just gravy.
arguingwithsignposts
@Sentient Puddle:
She’d have to *write* the column to qualify, which, you betcha.
Napoleon
I would take Gerson out and replace him with Cohen. Even though Kelly was only alive 3 years of the decade before being killed he was so odious as to make the list.
Kryptik
Too bad this is just the editorial page. Kurtz and Shalaigh Murray deserve some blame too. Same with ‘Ombudsman’ Andrew Alexander. You know, Mr. ‘Why are we letting Glenn Beck scoop us?!’
Mike E
@arguingwithsignposts:
She’s channelling her inner Mr. Hanky
MikeJ
@Kryptik: Robin “Hillary has b00bz” Givhan if we’re dipping into the “news” side.
geg6
I am pretty much down to two pundits whom I will deign to read. My list does not include ANY WaPo pundits since I am boycotting everything to do with that piece of shit. I read Gail Collins because she has a sense of humor, something much lacking among pundits. And I read David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. He is almost always sensible and smart. I don’t always agree with him and I realize he is a parochial choice, but I like sensible and I care about local issues as much or even more than national ones. Shribman discusses both, often framing national issues for their effects on local ones. He’s a good read for me. The rest of these idiots can go pound salt, whether they are right or left. They are all wankers, though I grant some are bigger ones than others.
low-tech cyclist
George Will has to be in the top 3, at least. Not only does he have a track record (dating back to at least 1992) of lying about climate science, but in addition, most of his columns in recent years have been a random walk between right-wing talking points and unimaginative slams at liberals.
He makes Broder and Samuelson look good by comparison, and that takes work. And he’s certainly got the biggest gap between reputation and actual quality: does anyone have ANY clue about why this guy is influential?
Tim F.
It’s his own fault that Ben Domenech did not make the list.
Zifnab
I don’t understand how Kristol fails to make the list. His incessant drum beat for war, anywhere and everywhere, no and forever, was possibly the core of the neo-conservative movement over the last decade. When the Cohens and the Broders and the George Wills waffled with public sentiment, Bill Kristol was like a staunch bastion of foreign genocide. I can’t think of anyone more proudly and defiantly pro-war.
Also, the dude’s own magazine – the Weekly Standard – was forever on the wrong side of public opinion and common sense. The guy ran the flagship “We’re Always Wrong” operation, with only the National Review running a close second.
:-p
EconWatcher
I think it has to be counted as unfair that George Will is on this list at all. Yes, he wanders off on evidence-free excursions (e.g., climate change). But the man has redeeming qualities. When he stands up, he stands up.
Recent example: Will responds to Cheney’s accusation that Obama “dithered” on Afghanistan with the retort that maybe Cheney should have dithered a little more before invading Iraq. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/25/george-will-to-cheney-you_n_333036.html Snap! Perfect answer.
Sorry, but that sort of thing should keep him off any “worst” list. It’s not an isolated example. (Note–I’m not nominating him for a “best” list. Just not the worst. Not by any stretch.)
Surreal American
Was Bill Kristol fired by Wapost? Otherwise no worst list is complete without his inclusion.
Napoleon
@Zifnab:
Easy, Matt’s rules were the only thing that counts is what you have written for the WaPo. Virturally nothing you mention involves things Kristol wrote for the WaPo.
(PS, has Kristol even been there a year? A guy on the list who has been dead 7 years, Kelly, has 3 times the period to have churned out trash the Kristol has for the WaPo).
dj spellchecka
this is kinda like ranking which vat full of animal shit [cat, dog, donkey, elephant, gorilla, etc ] i’d rather use as a hottub, but you’re being way too kind to the kraut…his “israel should keep killing everything moving in gaza until the few people left alive finally turn on their leadership” column should have gotten him expelled from the human race
danimal
Replace Applebaum with Kristol and move Dean Broder up a few notches and you’ve got the right list.
Jeez, that’s a horrible stable filled with braying asses.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@low-tech cyclist:
He personally helped Reagan win the 1980 election. He was one of Reagan’s behind-the-scenes debate coaches helping the candidate to prepare for the upcoming debate, and then after the debate was over put on his “neutral, objective observer pundit” hat and pontificated widely about how well Reagan had done in the debate, without disclosing his own role in the debate prep. After that, Will was golden in the Village. He could read the DC telephone book to folks for the rest of his career and get paid handsomely to do it.
Zifnab
@Napoleon:
Fair enough. I get a bunch of his NYTimes junk confused with whatever he’s done in the WaPo. Mostly, I keep remembering the “Republicans will triumph in 2008!” nonsense he kept spewing right up until the day of the election.
I mean monsterous or not, Kristol has the supernatural ability to always be wrong. It’s humbling. That should count for something, no matter where he’s writing.
Stroszek
It’s too stacked against right-wingers because WaPo is too stacked with right-wingers.
Brick Oven Bill
For some reason I caught myself watching one of those Sunday shows with some of these guys and their Leftist counterparts. These people seem to be all on Prozac, or a similar drug. They are detached from reality.
I doubt David Chase is on Prozac, as The Sopranos is a pretty accurate representation of life as my eyes observe it. ‘The Sopranos’ series made a lot of money. It is also a high quality product.
If the Washington Post and other newspapers want to make money, they should demand that their writers stop taking Prozac.
Fwiffo
Somehow, the “lights out” column reminded me of Ross Douthat’s “chunky Reese Witherspoon” column, which, while not qualified for this list, is another fine horror of right-wing punditry.
Noonan
Moments like this are when the newspaper industry’s implosion seems obvious.
DougJ
I think it has to be counted as unfair that George Will is on this list at all.
Ultimately, it’s unfair to include him and Krauthammer, I should have probably made it a top 8 list. That said, he and Krauthammer have dabbled in anti-scientific nonsense far too much for a Princeton PhD and a Harvard MD. So their inclusion is not entirely undeserved.
jeffreyw
Speaking of “fun while it lasts”, I just put two cornish hens into the oven. I may have to eat a sammich when I’m done picking those tiny bones clean.
Jim
Cohen resigned from the human race when he said the Iraq war was justified by his need for therapeutic violence after 9/11. And if the word “wankery” did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it for his column on Colbert. Next to those, his recent column on Obama (“a man whose life contains no significant achievement”, or something like that) is just garden variety beltway cocktail party chat.
And I agree, with Bailey @1, Krauthammer is a raving lunatic, Brooks is pretty much a pompous boor.
Zifnab
@Noonan: What’s sad is that the editorial section has almost become the newspaper. It’s like no one (especially the editorialists) read the god damn stories anymore. People just listen to the gossips and soothsayers, hoping for the answer to the riddle, “How did the DOW go up/down 300 points with a black man in office?”
Jim
with Liz Cheney, and the tag-team of McCain, Graham and Lieberman
Kryptik
@Zifnab:
THat’s because the news section has pretty much become as bad as the editorial section.
As for the edit at the top post: What? No Bolton? No Mr. ‘I can count on the WaPo to let me tell you every two months about why we need to glass Iran, right here, right now’?
arguingwithsignposts
Even the dean Brooks has to bow before the smudge. sleeping on the blanket.
DougJ
Even the dean Brooks has to bow before the smudge. sleeping on the blanket.
How old is smudge?
Tim in SF
Dude, show your work.
Put a paragraph under each of them explaining the wankery.
Sentient Puddle
@Tim in SF: Oh hells no. Reading Cohen’s algebra column made my brain come close to melting.
arguingwithsignposts
@DougJ:
9 weeks.
Malron
Speaking of shitty, self-absorbed punditry…
After saying this in the past
Jane Hamsher went on Fox & Friends this morning.
MattF
I think Kelly belongs on the list– Maybe people have forgotten, but he was tremendously influential– and one of the people who set the pattern for crazed Clinton-hating in the 90’s.
Chuck Butcher
Even with disputes over a couple people, a list of 15 including the amount of stupidity displayed by that list at one newspaper, any one newspaper, would be astonishing. I’m not sure I can even exempt the Moonies or Faux.
Barry
Dougj: “His algebra and “better with the lights off” were probably the two worst columns I have ever read in my life.”
To me, that second column was basically a recital of the “Anti-Apostle’s Creed” by somebody accepting Satanism. He specifically renounced the basic ethos of journalism.
David in NY
Wow! Cohen’s “algebra” column is phenomenally bad. I was skeptical about putting him first, but I’m becoming a convert. The man cannot think. And furthermore, if he thinks that mathematicians can’t write, he ought to be locked in a room until he’s read Paul Lockhart’s, “A Mathematician’s Lament”.
Zifnab
@Malron:
Wow. She just lost points in my book.
Fox & Friends? I mean, really? At least when you’re up against Hannity or O’Reily or Beck, you can claim you’re marching into the Heart of Darkness. But Steve Doocy? There’s no excuse for that.
Mike E
@EconWatcher:
George Will=Oxymoron
Brachiator
The raging stoopidity of Cohen’s algebra column qualifies him to be one of the worst columnists of any decade.
Mumphrey
I myself think that Cohen’s “I am a funny guy” is the worst column ever written.
It floors me that anybody, even Cohen, could be so clueless about what makes somebody funny that he can write “I am a funny guy,” by way of stating his “credentials”. I never would have guessed that anybody could misunderstand what it means to be funny so badly. If you’re funny, you don’t have to state your funniness as a “credential”, like you’re a witness in court (“Your Honor, I’d like to enter into the record that this witness is funny. He has a certificate from Richard Cohen to that effect.”) If you’re funny, you don’t have to tell us; you show us by saying or doing something funny. How is that so hard to fathom?
gwangung
You ask this of an ideology that though An American Carol was a comedy?
Mike E
George Will=Oxymoron
handy
ftfy.
Annie
@arguingwithsignposts:
Best picture so far. She is quite long for such a little girl…
Batocchio
I prefer the revised list, and the addition of the irregular list. I wrote over at Yglesias’s place that I had to vote for Cohen as well – Krauthammer at least puts some effort into crafting his BS.
Jim
@Zifnab:
She got attention and they got somebody to bash Democrats.
Zuzu's Petals
Liz Cheney.
Regular or irregular, she’s invariably full of crap.
Zuzu's Petals
@David in NY:
Reading that column reminded me of my favorite Guindon cartoon:
Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.
trollhattan
I don’t know how George Will could not be on the list—he of the denim jihad a quarter century too late (all hail Herb Tarlek).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/15/AR2009041502861.html
That sort of column at least is laughable but his ill-informed climate screeds enable those who would doom us all in their pursuit of better quarterly P&Ls and teaching the DFHs a stern lesson. Screw him and the damn bowtie.
Geeno
@Malron: Everyone’s gotta pay the bills
Mike in NC
Will has a fancy house in Chevy Chase and is a darling of the Georgetown/Bethesda/Capitol Hill cocktail party circuit. His all-time worst column came out the day after the coup against Gorbachev (which quickly failed). He thought it was a great excuse to restart the Cold War, or maybe even kick off WWIII.
Woodrowfan
Mike Kelly bought every rw nutso talking point about the Clintons, and then when he was killed, his buddies in the MSM wailed about what a great journalist had been lost. jackass.
Gus
@Napoleon: No way. Gerson is the king of concern trolls. I’m not sure who I’d leave out, but Cohen should definitely be top 5 if not #1.
tripletee
@low-tech cyclist:
Because morons confuse a hefty thesaurus and an ability to craft stultifying prose with actual intelligence?
asiangrrlMN
@David in NY: Yeah. Holy shit. Just reading the excerpts made my jaw drop. If I didn’t know what a blithering idiot Cohen was, I would say he was writing satire.
Looking at that list depresses me. I read KThug and a few others (NOT named Douthat or Brooks) over at NYT, but not so much recently.
@arguingwithsignposts: Have I told you how much I’m loving the random Smudge posts? Such a doll!
bayville
I think Eric Cantor belongs somewhere in that off-list, maybe as an alternate or replacing Kristol.
But Michael Kelly was the worst columnist evah, in the history of daily newspaperdom.
He had the unique talent of being a pompous, tedious writer, factually challenged coupled with a blinding anti-Arab rage that would make Friedman blush. He sucked, which is what it should have read on his tombstone.
Will
But Michael Kelly’s columns in the run-up to the war were so mendacious, so packed with lies and white-hot rhetoric against the handful of war critics…no, I’m sorry, he at least deserves to be in the top 10, if not #1.
Richard Cohen is just a doofus. Kelly was downright dangerous. And Richard Cohen at least had the stones to climb down from his pro-war position and admit he was completely, hopelessly wrong on that score. Bill Kristol would back down from supporting the war before Michael Kelly would have.
He was probably the most arrogant columnist of the last decade. At least he finally fulfilled his dream of playing soldier.
fledermaus
Pick a Richard Cohen column, any one, and you will find the most oblivious self-congratulating crap ever written by anyone ever. For Example:
Kind of takes the breath away, don’t it? The lack of Cohen in the list is an unpardonable error.
Zifnab
@Jim:
I don’t care if she got laid.
Steve Doocy. Game over. You lose.
J Price Vincenz
With HCR so important this year, I can’t imagine why Betsy McCaughey didn’t make the list: she’s literally a pathological lair and/or lobbyist/corporatist tool. Most of the others are shady and nefarious; she is putrid and vile. The routes and distances her lies have taken make her inclusion mandatory, IMO.
And, oh, God, those round Malcolm Forbes glasses that Richard Cohen wears are sufficient to put him on the most clumsy attempt at metrosexuality. I’m sure they giggle behind his back at his Safeway.
And for the decade list, I would put those two go-to liberals from the Trilateral Commission, O’ Hanlon and whatever his name is… Thankfully, we don’t see them much anymore, but the wasted lives from the Iraqi invasion and occupation rest on their shoulders (note I didn’t say consciences).
Morgan
@David in NY: What’s more, he seems to think pointing to deserts on a map is an exercise in reasoning.
Morgan
@arguingwithsignposts: I’ll see your smudge and raise you a scamp.
Joel
I think we need to expand this, to include the entire Kaplan umbrella (Slate, we’re looking at you!).
A separate list needs to be prepared for Salon, and frankly (despite my liking it overall), the Atlantic.
Califlander
You forgot Cohen’s homage to aerial bombardment as a form of therapy:
Hannah Arendt captured Cohen’s spirit — I don’t think the word “soul” really applies — when she wrote about the banality of evil.
tom c
David Brooks is a foundation of enlightenment and reason compared to Krauthammer. When I think about Brooks at his very worst he comes off as a well meaning shmoe. Krauthammer has always made me think of Doctor Strangelove, oddly enough, even before I ever heard about his being confined to a wheelchair. I agree about Cohen though. This is the first time I ever saw David Broder’s name in any context and thought he was being underrated.
lol chikinburd
A shame. He was so good as Dietrich on Barney Miller.
Lex
@bailey:
Granted, this expands the boundaries of the contest beyond the area of printed work, but: FTW.
I stumbled across that sick bastard on TV earlier tonight, complaining because we hadn’t gone to war against Iran already. I so badly want his paralyzed ass to wake up in a foxhole surrounded by corpses with no weapon, no comrades in sight, no way to move and the enemy advancing with bayonets fixed. If he wants blood that badly, let him drink his own.
mclaren
Low-tech cyclist remarked:
Yeah! C’mon, people, doesn’t anyone remember that brainfrying column in which George Will called the speeches of the former drunk-driving C student in the Oval Office “Lincolnian”?
Comparing the incoherent babblings of a stuttering stumbling fumbling bumbling bungling idiot who spewed gibberish like “I know what it’s like to put food on my family” to the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln…holy crap. For sheer mindlessly dishonest butt-snorkeling and outright brazen lying in the face of a Himalayan mountain of evidence to the contrary, George Will’s demented brown-nosing horseshit and contrafactual jeremiads stand alone as a sinister monument to the brain-destroying effects of Reaganoid conservatism.
Sly
Michael Kelly stays on the fucking list.
For what it’s worth, I could probably go through the BJ archives from the pre-Enlightenment era and find posts in praise of Kelly and his puerile horse shit. I understand a lot of people who advocated for the Iraq War considered him a “reasonable liberal” (formerly of the Liberal New Republic, no less). I never wished the man ill, nor did I ever achieve any satisfaction in knowing that he died covering a war he so smugly pimped in his writing.
But that doesn’t mean that the three years of the decade that he wrote for the WaPo weren’t ten times worse than the near nine years of mealy-mouthed nonsense penned by Richard Cohen. Because they were.
Barry
Re: Krauthammer
“I so badly want his paralyzed ass to wake up in a foxhole surrounded by corpses with no weapon, no comrades in sight, no way to move and the enemy advancing with bayonets fixed. If he wants blood that badly, let him drink his own.”
And the enemy knows what he’s done (say, he’s got Torture Corps insignia on his uniform), and has the leisure to make it loooooooooooooooooooooong aaaaaaaaannnnnd sloooooooooooooooooooow, no quick bayonetting.
That man’s been a raving Dr. Strangelove for as long as I’ve been away of him. He’s like a press version of a vampire, who has to drink blood to live.
He and Kelly are in the extreme category, where their editors should be punished right alongside of them.