They Write Letters

My friend Will Bunch writes to David Broder. Excerpt:

And yet, I am also a blogger – professionally, and I guess by temperament. And when I see what is coming out of your hometown in 2006 -- ugly politics driven by fear, the chucking of the constitution and our deep-seated judicial principles such as the writ of habeas corpus – it can indeed make me very angry, so angry that there are times when, yes, I must sound “vituperative” on occasion.

I am writing to you to explain why that is.

Mad? Often. "Vituperative"?...sometimes, but "foul mouthed" never. I know some people have said and even sent some nasty things to you – I don’t endorse that. I would not and will not insult you; in fact, there was a time in my life when I very much wanted to be you, when I was a young man who wanted your seat one day as one of "the boys on the bus," covering the Making of the Next President. And you were very much a man for those times, the 1970s, when the rise of TV advertising meant that spin would complete the war to replace substance. America needed people like you then – with the right kind of cynicism to cut through all the crap on both sides of the aisle.

But what we used to call "a healthy dose of cynicism" eventually became toxic, for you and for so many of your "gang of 500" inside the Beltway. Somehow, exposing the lies of the system during the Watergate era, when you won a deserved Pulitzer, grew into benign acceptance that politics is pretty much a sport – a sport where, well, everybody lies.

And while you and your new lunch pals at the Palm knew you still had to expose the occasional lie, or at least get worked up about it, to maintain your journalistic credibility, you only went for the low-lying fruit, the “objective lie,“ the DNA test on a blue dress from the gap, not the elusive but ultimately false premises that would kill tens of thousands on a bloody war far from most Americans’ sight. Monica Lewinsky allowed you and your friends to prove that journalism was still about exposing...well, exposing something or other.

You, and your colleague Bob Woodward, and so many others, grew to admire the callous art of spincraft you'd been trained to expose -- so much so that when Hurricane Katrina devastated an American city and betrayed a stunning indifference to the fate of the nation's poorest, you could only write that Katrina "opens new opportunities for [Bush]to regain his standing with the public."