I’m beginning to wonder if the editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post ever bother to do more than spellcheck their columnists’ work. I continue to see columns published in both newspapers that lack any kind of clarity or proper structure. Kathleen Parker is today’s example. She starts out by asking facetiously why the “Republicans hate art, the elderly and children?”
But she never answers the question. She takes a jab at the premise of the question and says we need a new metaphor to describe the demonization of Republicans, but she doesn’t provide the new metaphor. Instead, she lists a couple of examples of what she considers “hysterical” accusations of cruelty leveled by Democrats and commentators and then dismisses those accusations by changing the subject.
In the midst of so much hysteria, even some Republicans seem to have lost sight of the big picture. They’ve been scrambling over relative peanuts — a few billion dollars in a $3.8 trillion budget — while Democrats were setting the table for a feast. How delicious to blame Republicans for shutting down government.
From here, she meanders into some musings on John Boehner’s strategic good-sense, Chuck Schumer’s talking-points, Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, and whether anyone other than her is really getting the point. But no one can get the point because she doesn’t have one. Or, rather, she has ten points, none of which are neatly tied together.
If this were a high-school essay, she’d be told that it’s incoherent and to rewrite it. Peggy Noonan writes in this same stream-of-consciousness style for the Wall Street Journal. Writing a column for a newspaper should be as simple as breathing and using the toilet. It should be second nature. After you’ve written a few dozen of them, you can do it on your sleep. A lot of the older columnists actually seem to write their columns on auto-pilot, but at least they conform to the style. More and more, though, I see columns that simply don’t pass the minimum standard for construction. We have a lot of talented writers in this country. Some of them ought to be given the space that is being wasted by people like Kathleen Parker.
