A Job Application

Dear Jeff Bezos:

Now that conservative radio personality and newspaper columnist Hugh Hewitt has left The Washington Post in a big ol’ on-air hissy fit, I’d like to apply for his job as your newspaper’s chief Trump apologist and sane-washer. My journalistic credentials: For almost a full week now I have been editor-in-chief of….

This is the new, go-to news source for Americans who are pissed off by your dictum killing The Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. The Pist is flourishing splendidly.

As you know, Mr. Hewitt (the Whitest Man on Earth, pictured above, a man who makes Colin Jost seem like Eddie Murphy) yesterday literally stomped off a live-streamed Post discussion panel after the host, Jonathan Capehart, dared to suggest the obvious and self-evident fact that Donald Trump might be, y’know, blatantly laying the groundwork to contest the election results if he loses. In case you missed it, the hissyfit is here.

Many people at The Post and elsewhere ungenerously suspect that Mr. Hewitt, who is handsome and presentable and uses big-boy fancy words, had been a DEI hire. That’s because he has been willing to constantly ascribe Donald Trump’s fulminating, race-baiting actions not to those of a spit-flying, hateful, lying lunatic but to a conventional, anodyne candidate, as though Trump were, say, Adlai Stevenson or Thomas Dewey. Mr. Hewitt, many believe, was hired by The Post to provide so-called “balance” to the newspaper’s opinions section, under the specious assumption that all opinions, however egregious, must be deemed equally arguable. It’s weak-kneed, he-said, she-said journalism.

Anyway, to get to the point, I think I can fill Mr. Hewitt’s job as chief cook and bottle sane-washer. For example, I would re-cast Trump’s recent statement that he will “protect women whether they like it or not” not as a threat or as disdainful misogyny but as a form of conservative gallantry long-lost in our distressingly woke world.

I would defend Trump’s use of the term “black jobs” not as ignorance and bigotry and naked condescension, but as a misunderstood reference to jobs like coal miner, or playing Zorro on TV.

By fighting “the enemy from within,” I’d write that Trump was actually making a reference to his determination to eliminate cancer in America.

Because, like Hewitt, I am a bloviating historian, I would explain that Trump’s role in the January 6th, 2021 Capitol riot best compares to Gandhi’s role in the 1930 March to the Sea to protest the British Raj. The only difference is that at the end of his 240-mile journey, Gandhi helped himself to some salt, whereas at the end of their 2.4 mile journey, Trump’s people helped themselves to some souvenirs.

I would indignantly explain that it is a calumny to claim that Mr. Trump’s racist and xenophobic statements are an attempt to throw raw meat to his aptly-named “base,” because Mr. Trump does not approve of raw meat. He approves only of deeply, deeply, fanatically overcooked meat that can be snapped in half.

And please rest assured that I will never suddenly quit the paper in a huff. If called for, I will absquatulate it.

References on request.

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This is actually my second open letter to Mr. Bezos. I wrote one as a column in The Post in 2013, after he bought the paper. It was predictive. It stands up alarmingly well. Bezos was following most of my suggestions — right up until the end, alas.

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Please remember that on election evening, I will be live blogging here, starting at 8 p.m. To be able to participate through comments, which is where most of the action will be, you will need to become a paying member; it can be as cheap as $5.

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ALSO, please send any of your Questions and Observations, about the election or anything else, right here:

All topics are open this week. I will address them next week.

When I was a young man, I had a bit of an embarrassing secret. I do not get celebrity crushes — I think they are pathetic — but purely from a distance, I was in love with Teri Garr. I admitted it only to myself. And then, when the brilliant and funny and talented and beautiful actress died this week, I decided to confess my feelings to some male friends, only to discover they ALL secretly loved Ms. Garr. It made me feel like such a cuck.

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Okay, and now, finally, today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

See you on Tuesday. It will be harrowing, of course.