Why I'm mad: An open letter to David Broder from a fellow journalist

This is an open letter that I am sending today to columnist David Broder of the Washington Post, the so-called "dean of American journalism." I am hoping that others will read it, because it touches on many of the important issues of a free press and democracy that I so frequently deal with here. -- Will Bunch (Note: includes minor edits for grammar, etc.)

Dear David Broder,

I am writing in response to your recent columns in the Washington Post, embracing the make-believe "independence party" of an American political center that doesn't really much exist anymore -- except in your mind and the fantasies of a few like-minded D.C. pundit types . In one column, you managed to dismiss the ideas of millions of Americans who share little except great alarm at where America and its values have been heading the last six years, lumping them – us, actually – all together as simply "the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left."

I know you've heard back from a few of them. But you haven't heard yet from someone like me. Like you, I am a newspaper reporter, and I share some of your core values, including a commitment to journalistic digging and hard work, and an unwillingness to accept the pat and partisan answers at face value.

And yet, I am also a blogger – professionally, and I guess by temperament. And when I see what is coming out of your hometown in 2006 -- ugly politics driven by fear, the chucking of the constitution and our deep-seated judicial principles such as the writ of habeas corpus – it can indeed make me very angry, so angry that there are times when, yes, I must sound "vituperative" on occasion.

I am writing to you to explain why that is.

Mad? Often. "Vituperative"?...sometimes, but "foul mouthed" never. I know some people have said and even sent some nasty things to you – I don't endorse that. I would not and will not insult you; in fact, there was a time in my life when I very much wanted to be you, when I was a young man who wanted your seat one day as one of "the boys on the bus," covering the Making of the Next President. And you were very much a man for those times, the 1970s, when the rise of TV advertising meant that spin would complete the war to replace substance. America needed people like you then – with the right kind of cynicism to cut through all the crap on both sides of the aisle.

But what we used to call "a healthy dose of cynicism" eventually became toxic, for you and for so many of your "gang of 500" inside the Beltway. Somehow, exposing the lies of the system during the Watergate era, when you won a deserved Pulitzer, grew into benign acceptance that politics is pretty much a sport – a sport where, well, everybody lies.

And while you and your new lunch pals at the Palm knew you still had to expose the occasional lie, or at least get worked up about it, to maintain your journalistic credibility, you only went for the low-hanging fruit, the "objective lie," the DNA test on a blue dress from the Gap, not the elusive but ultimately false premises that would kill tens of thousands on a bloody war far from most Americans' sight. Monica Lewinsky allowed you and your friends to prove that journalism was still about exposing...well, exposing something or other.

You, and your colleague Bob Woodward, and so many others, grew to admire the callous art of spincraft you'd been trained to expose -- so much so that when Hurricane Katrina devastated an American city and betrayed a stunning indifference to the fate of the nation's poorest, you could only write that Katrina "opens new opportunities for [Bush]to regain his standing with the public."

Your cynicism hardened as it grew -- to the point where your most famous quote is that "anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office." Ideas didn't matter. Do you even remember what you wrote in 2000, when Al Gore gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. You said:

I have to confess, my attention wandered as he went on through page after page of other swell ideas, and somewhere between hate crimes legislation and a crime victim's constitutional amendment, I almost nodded off.

And when "the dean of American journalism" writes that, no wonder that so many voters thought that Gore and George W. Bush were Tweedledee and Tweedledum, or that a protest vote for Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan in what proved to be the closest presidential election in modern American history wouldn't matter.

But it did matter, didn't it?

Everything changed, starting on Jan. 20, 2001 and for good just eight months later. You didn't seem to notice. But some Americans did…even a few journalists.

It's not like anyone become "vituperative" overnight. When Bush smudged the memory of 9/11 got Congress to almost unanimously pass a bill to curb civil liberties with the Orwellian name of the Patriot Act, I and many others were just mildly "concerned." When I began to read in your own newspaper that the attack by al-Qaeda would be used to justify an unprovoked "pre-emptive" war on an oil-rich nation that has nothing to do with 9/11, that's when I -- and the millions of others you so blithely dismissed -- began to become "alarmed." Even then, we weren't "mad"; I know I wasn't, for anger is not part of my basic nature.

The night I became angry came in March 2003, the night that your friends and colleagues in the White House press room took a dive at a nationally televised press conference, and refused to challenge the president's specious grounds for war. I was furious over what my profession -- the one where you had once inspired me a generation ago -- had now become. And frankly, a lot of people on the left side became angry, too -- because, frankly, nobody was listening when they were nice. Protest marches of half a million got inside-the-A-section type coverage; at least a little vitriol finally got your attention, Mr. Broder.

And this was all before so much else happened -- the made-up terror alerts, the chucking of the Geneva Convention and the torture and abuse that followed, the illegal spying, the willful defiance of laws enacted by Congress, the ignoring of the fundamental right of habeas corpus. I won't waste a lot of space chronicling it all, because you know it all. You know it all…and yet you have done nothing.

That's because your cynicism is degenerative disease, and it leads to paralysis. You were the dean overseeing the Great Game of American politics, and then some bad guys came along and changed all the rules, and you tried so very hard not to notice. Now that the unlawful nature of this presidency is becoming recognized by a majority, you are praying for a deus ex machina, this fictional "independence party" that will not just save America but most importantly save you, save you from having to make a choice.

It's too late for that now, Mr. Broder. I do not blame you; I did not want to make this choice either; it chose me. I would have been much happier, frankly, spending my 40s the way that you spent your 40s, fighting for a Pulitzer Prize instead of fighting to preserve the basics of a democracy and a free press, the things that you and I and America were able to take for granted for so long. Nor do I expect you to join us; frankly, if that happens, it would probably would not happen until America has already fallen into the abyss, and I hope and pray that it does not come to that.

In the meantime, this journalist will use every weapon in his arsenal to preserve the values that allowed our craft to flourish in America -- including the weapon of anger. That may offend you from time to time; I guess on some level I hope that it doesn't.

Either way, don't expect me to apologize for it.

Because I won't.