too many Daves

Since I’m trying not to assume the worst in people, I won’t be accusing Politico editor John Harris of being disingenuous. With “disingenuous” off the table, we’re left with “clueless” to explain his justification for his web site’s decision to write up its Dick Cheney interviews without including distracting extraneous stuff like fact-checking, historical context, or journalism. Quoted in this post on The Plum Line, Harris offered three defenses for Politico’s approach. Here’s the one that set me off:

2. If you look at the other stories we ran at the same time as the Cheney quote there was a Josh Gerstein piece leading the site comparing Obama’s response to Bush’s after the 2001 shoe bomber and debunking the notion that Obama’s response was more sluggish. We also had a piece looking at GOP politicization of national security.

This, at best, is clueless. Does Harris think that modern readers peruse entire web sites? Does he imagine that someone who follows a Twitter link to one of Politico’s Cheney interviews will reward the shoddy journalism they encounter by clicking around to other Politico stories?

I should ease up. Who can’t relate to Harris’ notion that readers should arrive at balance by reading both the Cheney interview and the Gerstein piece?

It’s like I say to the outraged bystanders every time I knock a stranger out of a wheelchair for whistling a song I don’t like: “Five minutes ago I helped an old lady cross a street. I’m kind to animals. I give money — paper money — to panhandlers. On average, I’m a hell of a nice guy!”