For an allegedly liberal newspaper, the Washington Post's editorial page is mostly conservative, in the sense that it wants to conserve the status quo, which comforts the comfortable permanent ruling class.
But for all the Broder, Will, Krauthammer, Hiatt, etc., columns that do that, there are scant few writers there that challenge the Beltway conventional wisdom that so comforts and benefits billionaires and their D.C. lackeys.
E.J. Dionne is such a writer, and his column today is the best I've read there.
Headlined "The Tea Party is winning," Dionne's column is a scathing critique of how the media and the ruling class are screwing the American working class.
Details, below.
Dionne's thesis is that the far-right, billionaire-funded tea partiers have "fundamentally altered the country's dialogue" -- so that double-digit real unemployment is disregarded as important, and all that matters is getting government into Grover Norquist's deadly bathtub.
And the tea partiers have done that with the collusion of the corporate media:
Consider all of the problems taking a back seat to the deficit in Washington and the media. You haven't heard much lately on how Wall Street shenanigans tanked the economy in the first place - and in the process made a small number of people very rich. Yet any discussion of the problems caused by concentrated wealth (a vital mainstream issue in the America of Andrew Jackson and both Roosevelts) is confined to the academic or left-wing sidelines.
Unstated, but there implicitly, is the fact that if the corporate media had made as big a deal about illegal "Wall Street shenanigans" as they did about a legal presidential blowjob, the political landscape of the Great Recession would have been much different.
Dionne, unlike most in the Beltway media, recognizes that there are poor people in this country that the media ignore 24/7:
You hear a lot about how much the government spends on the elderly but not much about facts such as this one, courtesy of a report last fall from the Employee Benefit Research Institute: People over 75 "were more likely than other age groups - including children under 18 -- to live on incomes equal to or less than 200 percent of poverty."
Any analysis of the economic struggles many elderly people endure would get in the way of the "greedy geezer" storyline being spun to justify big cuts in Medicare benefits and Social Security.
Again, Dionne notes that right-wing "storylines" are stenographed by the media, who readily regurgitate spin from the billionaires' think tanks.
Here's the tea party stuff:
Thanks to the Tea Party, we are now told that all our problems will be solved by cutting government programs. Thus the House Republicans' budget bill passed Saturday. They foresee nirvana if we simply reduce our spending on Head Start, Pell grants for college access, teen pregnancy prevention, clean-water programs, K-12 education and a host of other areas.
Does anyone really think that cutting such programs will create jobs or help Americans get ahead? But give the Tea Party guys credit: They have seized the political and media agenda and made budget cutting as fashionable as Justin Bieber was five minutes ago.
More striking is the Tea Party's influence on Washington's political elite, which looks down at the more extreme men and women of the right when they appear on Fox News but ends up carrying their water.
Dionne does not criticize the tea party, that would take a whole 'nother column or two.
He does nail the corporate media for "carrying the water" of a far-right movement that represents a minority of voters, yet has influenced "Washington's political elite."
Regarding Social Security, Dionne does not agree with the Beltway CW, shamefully including Hiatt almost every day, that raising the age and cutting benefits is essential.
Lori Montgomery reported in The Post last week that a bipartisan group of senators thinks a sensible deficit reduction package would involve lifting the Social Security retirement age to 69 and reforming taxes, purportedly to raise revenue, in a way that would cut the top income tax rate for the wealthy from 35 percent to 29 percent.
Only a body dominated by millionaires could define "shared sacrifice" as telling nurses' aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people. I see why conservative Republicans like this. I honestly don't get why Democrats -- "the party of the people," I've heard -- would come near such an idea.
Hopefully, Congressional Democrats read, and understand, that second paragraph.
Dionne concludes with another diss of the corporate media:
In his State of the Union address, Obama made a good case that budget cutting is too small an agenda and that this is also a time for more government -- yes, more government -- in areas that would expand opportunities and strengthen the economy. That argument has been entirely drowned out. If politics is reduced to a crabbed and crabby accountants' war, Obama loses. The country will, too.
The tea party, and their billionaire backers, are winning because the corporate media have promoted their anti-government, anti-Obama, neo-Bircher program at every opportunity, for more than two years now.
In one short column, Dionne has told that story, afflicting the comfortable media colluders in almost every paragraph.
And, since dealing honestly with how the media sets national priorities, to the detriment of most Americans, is so rare, that's why this is the best WaPo column ever, IMHO.