Dear Jeff Bezos: It's Me, Again. With a Proposal.

Me.

Jeff, I read today that The Post is for some reason having trouble finding qualified applicants for the position of Executive Editor. I read this in Axios but not in The Post, presumably because after your paper recently killed a story about a well-regarded editor quitting her job to join the New York Times, your paper’s management offered the pale, boldly mendacious explanation that The Post simply “does not write about itself” any longer.

(I am guessing that new policy is flexible. I am guessing that The Post will write about it if the paper, say, wins a Pulitzer or something.)

Anyway, Please accept this essay as an application for the job. I would be a swell Executive Editor and triumphantly lead the paper for which I worked for 32 years, and which I loved for 31 and a half of them.

Here’s my pitch.

1. I think I could be of enormous financial benefit to you and your newspaper. The announcement of my hiring would instantly recapture many of the 250,000 subscribers The Post lost in a single day after revealing, just before the most consequential election in modern times, that under your orders it wouldn’t be endorsing a presidential candidate. I know those subscribers will be migrating back to you upon my hiring because a bunch of those deserting subscribers immediately gravitated right to this humble Website. They did it because I had written terrible things about your decision, including that it involved “jaw-dropping institutional cowardice,” and that, unlike with Katharine Graham, no Post staffers will cry when you die. Then, after the election, you offered groveling, butt-licking congratulations to Trump, and I puked out some more vitriol, and got even more Post deserters.

2. I will accept the job but will still publish this newsletter, including its wholly owned subsidiary,

   

   … which means that while I am running The Post and setting its policy and supervising its staff, I will be simultaneously savagely criticizing my leadership. This creates a wonderful opportunity for you! At best, I will be forcing myself not to edit in a craven, cowardly, self-protective way, inoculating you from continually having to be lacerated by me and others who follow my courageous lead as a media critic. At worst, you would always have have an unassailable reason to fire me at will with no need to explain yourself — because insubordination is a recognized workplace sin! Example: Calling the president of the United States “a ginormous, heinous horse’s ass.”

3. You won’t have to overpay me or worry that I will embarrass the newspaper through acts of spineless pandering or embezzling or making up stories or somesuch. I am a fine and honest editor who — as this newsletter attests — will work for the salary of a U.S. postal clerk trainee. My only professional sins will be in not liking certain ethnic foods, and hiring my dog.

Resume and references on request.

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Good. Now today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Questions and Observations go here:

See you in the Invitational on Thursday.