Gene Weingarten

In Sunday's Washington Post Magazine, "humorist" and former Style section editor Gene Weingarten lamented how bad our national anthem is: the headline is "What so proudly we failed." Many singers dislike the way the melody travels, but Weingarten seems to hate the whole idea of patriotic songs. He concluded by expressing how he liked the lilt of  France's national anthem "The Marseillaise" in elegant French, but it talks of someone arriving to "cut the throats of your sons and consorts" and seems to demand blood be spilled in revenge. He promised:

So, for the moment, I'll stick with our stupid ramparts. And by "for the moment," I mean "until next week," when, in this here space, as a service for generations to come, I'll rewrite our anthem.  

Many people who love our anthem as they've experienced it at every military funeral, or every fireworks celebration on July 4, or every baseball game or Olympic gold won't be desperately eager for Weingarten's snarky rewrite.

Washington Post Magazine humorist Gene Weingarten reacted badly in his Sunday column to the discovery that folk singer Arlo Guthrie is now a registered Republican: “By becoming a Republican, Arlo Guthrie has shredded the last remnants of my faith that our hippie principles had any lasting meaning. How can he do this to us? I'm a peaceable man, but if I had a hammer...”

Guthrie didn't become one of those warmongering neocons. He endorsed Ron Paul for president in early 2008. But Weingarten began with his marijuana-baked enthusiasm for hippiedom, which he clearly still loves dearly:

Like many middle-age people, I wear more than one hat. I'm a husband, a father, a journalist, a role model to a generation of idealistic young Americans, etc. But one of my favorite hats, the floppy felt one that still smells faintly of the sweet smoke of a controlled substance, is "former hippie." We children of the '60s tenaciously hold on to this self-image, even though our mirrors tell us that in terms of sheer hipness, we look more like Arlen Specter than Arlo Guthrie.

Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten is working in his hatred for conservatives in his Sunday Post Magazine column. The column is mostly a whimsical review of a George Bernard Shaw play and how Britain in Victorian times had a very uptight morality, and characters like pimps could only be portrayed as "loathsome deviants who would roast in Hell." Then he veered into this digression:

This sort of unwritten literary convention may seem quaint today, but such subtle rules are still practiced. For example, American journalists know they can write about the Tea Party, but only if it is presented as a serious ideological movement instead of as a posse of ignoramuses carrying signs such as the one in the second photo on this page [above].

Washington Post "investigative humorist" Gene Weingarten mocked conservatives again in Sunday’s Post Magazine, playing off the recent Daily Kos poll playing up the number of Republicans who believe Barack Obama wasn’t born in America, is a racist, and should be impeached. Weingarten makes no mention of the leftist source of his data. For all the reader knows, it’s a Gallup poll. Weingarten then makes up his own poll questions and answers for "humor,’ and the lowest blow is smearing conservatives with an anti-Semitic brush:

Do you trust any mainstream TV or print publications?

Eighty-one percent said, "Only Fox News."

Nineteen percent said, "Only The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Here’s more of his fake poll of the right-wing haters:

In “sharing my do's and don'ts” as a journalist, Washington Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten found good fodder in the presumption journalists are out to help liberals and Democrats while hurting conservatives and Republicans. “When deliberately slanting stories in support of liberal causes, always cover your tracks by quoting the other side,” he advised. “Example: 'President Obama wants universal health care, whereas Rush Limbaugh, the big fat drug addict, contends it is a bad idea.'”

That's not far from reality.

Two more of the bits of advice he offered in “Unfit to print: The secrets that journalists never told you, until now,” his “Below the Beltway” column on the back page of the December 13 Washington Post Magazine:

♦ Remember always that your word is your bond. “Off the record” means off the record, unless it's something you can use to embarrass a Republican.

♦ Never, ever write directly about the mandatory class you took in journalism school in how to give aid and comfort to America's enemies at home and abroad, or the seminar in how to disrespect the memories of our fallen heroes. These classes are a fraternal secret, like Skull and Bones.

Gene Weingarten has established himself as a Dick Cheney-hater, since he has compared him to Cambodian communist mass murderer Pol Pot. The "investigative humorist" and former editor of the Post’s Style section is at it again Sunday, with a splenetic and allegedly humorous venting against Cheney an an unholy, murderous savage.

The setup is Cheney’s forthcoming memoirs. He called up the publisher, Simon and Schuster’s Threshhold Editions, and they asked if he was "pro-book," meaning pro-Cheney. When he wouldn’t answer, the publisher would only answer to questions submitted in writing. This gave him an excuse to joke that he wouldn’t be biased or unprofessional, and then laid out all his Cheney hatred. Here’s a piece of it:

3. May I presume that Mr. Cheney will be remunerated in his customary way: a gunnysack filled with unblemished human heads?

Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine carried a cover story titled "Getting Hosed." Over a cartoon of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill Maher (who looked more like Robin Williams), "investigative humorist" Gene Weingarten, calling himself an "unapologetic, unreconstructed New Deal liberal," resolved to absorb 24 hours straight of punditry on TV, radio, and the Internet, and disdained Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, but also Keith Olbermann. In an online chat, Weingarten said this about conservatives: "I continue to believe that far right wing conservatives are either intelligent, rich people protecting their self interest, or poor, misguided, deluded fools who have been conned by the first group into working against their best interests."

Weingarten selected Valentine’s Day for his experiment, and the hot issue of that day was Jane Fonda dropping a C-word in promoting "The Vagina Monologues."

Clearly, Rush and Bill are courageously willing to address this shocking and distasteful subject even at the risk of driving their audiences into multi-orgasmic rapture.

After discussing on the Washington Post website how he’s an atheist who’s enjoyed recreational drugs and who giggles at calling hemorrhoids "asteroids," Washington Post Magazine editor Gene Weingarten truly offers too much of a peek into his soul. He suggests murderous Cambodian tyrant Pol Pot and Vice President Cheney are somehow morally equivalent. Weingarten also writes a humor column in the weekly magazine, which raises this question about the Cheney-like-Pol Pot thing: Is Weingarten failing at being a humorist? Or is he really lost in a bottomless pit of moral obtuseness?

Believe it or not, the line about Cheney surfaces in a discussion about peevish people who get extremely angry over bumper scratches on their cars:

Money talks: Maybe people don't want their cars scratched because they want to trade them in or sell them someday. A few scratches or dings can take hundreds of dollars off the re-sale value of a car. Someone leaning their seat back will not cost you hundreds of dollars. You are wrong on this one. I don't hit bumpers and I partially recline my seat on airplanes, this does not make me a bad person.

Gene Weingarten: Yep, the reclining does make you a bad person. Not evil like Pol Pot or Dick Cheney, but inconsiderate.