Challenges Ahead. HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)
Shot....
In the final State of the Union address of his presidency, Barack Obama was eloquent, forceful, appealingly personal - and ultimately unpersuasive. Unpersuasive in large part because the bulk of his audience in the House chamber Tuesday night was unpersuadable.
As Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged years ago, he and his fellow Republicans dedicated themselves to thwarting, obstructing and disrupting the Obama presidency at every turn, regardless of whether their recalcitrance was in the best interests of the nation.
Chaser...
Democracy, as the president noted, doesn't require that we all agree; in fact, rote agreement is repugnant to the very nature of democracy. What it does require is what he called "basic bonds of trust between its citizens." Democracy doesn't work, he said, "if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic."
It is possible that the two passages above were written by separate people. However, judging by the language it is highly unlikely. This then means that the Houston Chronicle has a member of its editorial staff who doesn't have the self-awareness necessary to craft a coherent thought, that no one else on the editorial board thought this was odd, and no editor gave this a once-over and said. 'Hey, wait....'
Conflicting, partisan, cognitive dissonance such as this reveals a lack of professionalism and maturity of argument. It's binary thinking in a complex world, in the 4th largest city in America, that has no business in a newspaper of record. Houston, for all of its warts, deserves better.
And while it's good that the Houston Chronicle has decided they should hide this behind their pay-wall (where few bother to read it) it should also act as evidence for leadership that Jeff Cohen and Company have exceeded their useful life as opinion writers and should either remove themselves, or be forcefully removed, to allow the resources to be better deployed toward the actual business of news gathering.
Since we know however, after several years of chastising the Editorial Board for their continued slide toward irrelevancy, that the Houston Chronicle leadership is not going to do this. (For some reason, newspapers consider unsigned editorials and opinion columnists to be the key to world classiness [as opposed to solid journalism, which is world class]) the only recourse is going to be to ignore this going forward.
Call it a late New Year's Resolution if you will. To not pay one iota of attention to either this Editorial Board, or any of the prominent political opinion writers at the Houston Chronicle.
Given this effort it's clear our lives will be better off for it.
