The Whitehousington Post

If having Rove's kewl kid Kool Aid dispensers Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol writing op-eds for The Washington Post didn't have you hanging your head shame and loathing, this most certainly will. The Washington Post has ominously decided that, rather than just having guest neo-cons write the occasional senseless war-support blurb, the paper would do rather well by having a full time White House flak pen a constant stream of West Wing propaganda for their readers.

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, The Washington Post announced -- none too loudly -- that Michael "yellow cake" Gerson, White House speechifier and minter of the coin of the realm, the White House talking point, will now have a full time gig on the op-ed pages of the rapidly deteriorating paper. Gerson was the one who palmed off the "mushroom cloud" bit, and it was his edifying writing that reinforced the claims that Hussein and al Qaeda were chums. And his most famous malediction: the "sixteen words" incantation in the 2003 SotU.

So, where does this latest little cross-pollination of government and media place us these days? Quite apart from the seemingly unattached media mouth pieces like Limbaugh, Coulter, O'Reilly, Hannity, and any number of mewling twits day in and day out, and further removed from excitable hacks like Judy Miller, we've got the administration paying or otherwise buying off 10 journalists at The Miami Herald to write and spout anti-Cuba propaganda. Of course, there was the infamous Armstrong Williams and who knows how many opinionators humping other Bush administration policy for a fist full o' dollars. We've got Fox News as White House spokesman. White House officials (Cheney, Rice, etc.) and unofficials (Kristol, Novak) are on Fox News almost all the time. We've got the White House shipping out "news reports" to various media outlets, expounding on the efficacy of White House policy. We watched as Sinclair Broadcasting try to jump on the swiftboat attack of Kerry in 2004. We saw Disney/ABC broadcast a blatantly biased and factually incorrect movie about 9/11, blaming Democrats for everything, just before the vital election in 2006 that Republicans are sweating. And now we have a White House speech writer writing his White House speeches on the pages of The Washington Post and pawning it off as independent opinion.

If we ever wanted transparency in government, I can't think of a better or more transparently clear indication of what is going on. But the worst part of all this is, we have become so inured to it, none of this hardly strikes us as all that odd or uncomfortable anymore. That the government is feeding the media and using taxpayer money to it barely registers. Which is exactly how this whole thing is supposed to work.