Former employee makes the big-time

Mark Steyn on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s headline for the Iraqi “spy” story: “Accused Spy Is Cousin Of Bush Staffer.” As Steyn notes, “to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s headline writer the salient fact about Lindauer is not her 10 years of work for the Democratic Party but the amazing revelation that she is a second cousin of Bush chief of staff Andrew Card.” And, although AP sent the story out under the headllne ”Woman Named In Spy Case Worked As Journalist, Congressional Aide,” the Post-Intelligencer’s headline writer also found the second cousin angle more salient than the fact that Lindauer used to work for . . . the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Steyn then examines the broader meaning of the Post-Intelligencer’s headline:
“These are serious times. Week after week, more details emerge of the extraordinary number of influential Westerners, from French government ministers to the head of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, who appear to have been in the pay of Saddam. That’s, among other things, what Susan Lindauer is accused of. But we don’t have a serious press for these serious times. Boring and self-important is not the same as serious. But one reason why John Kerry calculates he can get away with damning the Bush administration as ‘crooks’ and ‘liars’ is because he figures he can count on the mainstream media doing what the Post-Intelligencer did — instinctively framing every issue in anti-Bush terms, no matter how ludicrously. . . But that’s one more reason why Bush will win in November: The media and the Democrats are sustaining each other in their delusions.”

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