The Krauthammer syndrome

So there on one op-ed page of the Washington Post we've got Charles Krauthammer assailing President Obama for having "started his presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office." Elsewhere, on the White House Blog, Dan Pfeiffer corrects Krauthammer: "normally we wouldn’t address a rumor that’s so patently false.... [B]ust still in the White House. In the Residence. Outside the Treaty Room."

Parenthetically, there are actually two busts. One was indeed returned; the other indeed remains. This, too, is addressed by Pfeiffer, in an "update."

Anyway, that resolves that.

Or does it? Bear with me.

On another op-ed page of the Washington Post we've got the Post's associate editor, David Maraniss, author of Barack Obama: The Story, writing that

In the introduction to my book, I took note of a sick political culture where "facts are so easily twisted for political purposes and where strange armies of ideological pseudo-historians roam the biographical fields in search of stray ammunition." That sentence is now cited on right-wing Web sites as evidence that I hold them in contempt.... I do hold some of them in contempt.... I hold them in contempt for the way they disregard facts and common sense and undermine the role of serious history as they concoct conspiracy theories that portray the president as dangerous, alien and less than American.

So here's a WaPo associate editor decrying "a sick political culture" in which "facts are so easily twisted" by "ideological pseudo-historians" to "portray the president as dangerous, alien and less than American" and then we click back to WaPo's Krauthammer page and find no correction or clarification whatsoever of his misleading rot after the White House debunks the sick, twisted, ideological bust "controversy." 

I appreciate that Maraniss, though a Post editor, is not the Post's op-ed editor. Maraniss' intellectual chastity remains intact. Yet one would think that a paper worthy of Maraniss' fair intelligence would itself be fairly smart enough to hire an op-ed editor to correct or clarify the reams of malicious boneheadedness that emanate from malicious boneheads like Krauthammer.

I appreciate that Krauthammer is quite intelligent, too; I claim no other. But his rabid malice toward Barack Obama calcified long ago into a solid mass of sick, twisted bone between his ears. A vestige of Krauthammer's intelligence is still detectable in his stylistic eloquence, however his hatred--a pure, venomous bile that hemorrhages weekly in a vertiginous freedom from any responsible editorial cauterization--mitigates all respect.