A Promise I Had To Break

(I’ll explain the post title shortly.)

A few weeks ago, Chris Satullo, formerly the editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote this piece of refuse masquerading as a newspaper column that purported to be some kind of a primer for the presidential candidates of both parties (first saw it on Eschaton). And if you’re able to read it (and I suggest not doing so on a full stomach), you will see that he was doing so with some kind of a smart-alecky attitude about most of them (and yes, I would be a bit disingenuous here if I automatically blew off someone because they were trying to be that way).

Well anyway, here is what Satullo had to say about John Edwards…

John Edwards (D.): Had the most costly haircut since Samson. Trust me: That notorious $400 snip job on his gleaming locks will never stop costing Edwards with the working-class Americans who he thinks are his constituency. A silly, concocted demerit, sure, but that's modern politics. If you liked how nominating a faux populist with a seven-figure bank account, a killer mansion and ab/fab hair worked out for the Dems in '04, you'll love Edwards.

Yep, you guessed it; I pretty much hit the roof when I read that (and as I go back and pick some more dreck from Satullo’s mess, I realize that he slammed Chris Dodd even more by totally ignoring Dodd’s courageous stance against telco immunity in the proposed FISA bill).

Well anyway (and I left a comment at Eschaton about this around that time), I emailed Satullo and told him how ridiculous he was for writing this and how some of his other “Center Square” columns about how to make Philadelphia better were really BOOR-ING and read like chamber of commerce boilerplate (off topic, I’ll admit). I also said that I thought it was condescending of him to put the word netroots in quotes the way he did.

Satullo actually replied and said that he put netroots in quotes because he had some information documenting the fact that only five percent of the Inquirer’s readership understood what the netroots was, and as far as his other columns are concerned, he told me not to read them because I obviously don’t get it, or words to that effect. I responded and said maybe the reason only five percent of the Inquirer’s readership knows anything about the netroots is because your paper has done such a poor job of reaching out to us, and the best way to fix that would be to publish David Sirota as other newspapers have (including the Bucks County Courier Times, as noted here) and as far as not reading your column goes, I can assure you that I won’t from now on (hence the broken promise, and my apology).

So anyway, I scanned philly.com today and came across the latest from Satullo, and I couldn’t help but read some of it. And what on earth do you think it contains?

Passages like this…

Cynicism and mockery have long been our default public attitudes toward our political leaders. Lord knows, we have reason.

But negativity and scorn are acids that eat away not just at naïveté, but also at reason and goodwill.

And as if that holier-than-thou pronouncement isn’t repulsive enough given the Satullo column where he committed drive-by journalism on Edwards, he concocts this in his same column today…

An irony: All of this is happening during a presidential race that has smiled on several candidates of high merit, and driven off the frauds and clowns.

“Frauds and clowns”? Only a few sentences after Satullo condescends to write that “cynicism and mockery have been our default public attitudes”?

I really don’t want to know the universe this man inhabits where such thought processes are looked upon as rational.

Once again, this is considered to be acceptable editorial content for Philadelphia’s conservative newspaper of record, in which political opinion writing appears to be little more than an excuse for curmudgeonly scolding at the behest of Brian Tierney and Philadelphia Media Holdings L.L.C. as opposed anything acquainted with the established practices of the Fourth Estate.