3 thoughts on “David Broder, 1929-2011

  1. Somewhere, Broder is lecturing everyone about how Heaven and Hell are too partisan.

    And how, since most of America is, and so most of the people in Heaven must also be, center-right, and how God and his Son need to negotiate with Satan and create a center-right afterlife.
    I hope that people in Heaven are crying, “HOOZANGA!” as we speak (see my comment on the earlier “Good Read” post to get the joke).

    On the serious side, I’ve been watching and reading him for almost 40 years. I never liked him, never though much of him as either a writer or a TV pundit. But, he was the Dean of the DC Village – for better or worse, and almost always worse.
    And he was, while being the last of his kind, also the prototype for all that we now have – inane, insipid, and equivocating coverage disguised as journalism. A brand of journalism that doesn’t really strive to give the reader a glimpse or a better understanding of the truth, but just shows the division between two sides, and the points that both sides of an argument have. He would then beg both sides to meet, and almost every time, if not EVERY time, demanded that the left concede because from his high and wealthy perch above the well paid 3-ring political and pundit circus in DC, he drew upon myths and hearsay more than memory or actual investigation and formed an opinion that was describing and analyzing a land not of great divides, but a center-right nation yearning for politicians to whisper sweet nothings in each others right ears, and to compromise – always, always to the right.
    In some respects, he was like the center-right writer between the great Studs Terkel, and, though I hated the SOB, I have to admit he could write, William F. Buckley. Broder couldn’t come close to Buckley as a writer or thinker, let alone Studs, who is the most under-rated writer/journalist in the last 50 years.
    I won’t lie and say I’ll miss him. But I never wished him any ill in his life. I just wished he could see the world not as some pundit over-steeped in the DC tea for over 50 years, but as a working person looking from the outside in. But he wrote for the DC congnoscenti, and was their beloved creature and hero – their Dean.
    Too often, he reversed the Fourth Estate’s unwritten credo, and instead, ‘Comforted the comfortable, and afflicted those already afflicted.’
    And maybe now we can begin to undo the damage he helped start and continued and encouraged.
    Still, despite all of that, RIP David Broder.
    We’ll not see your like again. If we’re lucky…

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