Meets Expectations

I read this brief blurb on Mitch Daniels' "doubling down" on the cultural war truce, and thought it was particularly shoddy piece of political prognostication. Whether or not Daniels is sufficiently socially conservative to win a GOP nomination, it's hardly the case that his dead-eyed focus on fiscal issues has no purchase in a GOP primary. But more broadly, the piece was written as a string of beltway cliches/conventional wisdom of dubious accuracy ("Much as Obama insists that international consensus trumps all other foreign policy concerns ..." Oh please.) written as if they were droplets of wisdom only a Seasoned Washington Post Reporter can tell you -- it just screamed hack.

And that was before I spotted the byline: Jennifer Rubin. I had thought it was just some smarmy WaPo analyst. Jennifer Rubin I already perceived as an idiot who wrote one of the more nakedly anti-Semitic hit pieces to appear in a mainstream publication in recent years. It's nicely validating that I still had this shudder of "I'm dealing with a moron" even before I saw it was written by someone I already detested.