Why Does The Washington Post Hate Social Security?

Posted by Natasha Chart, MyDD.com at 10:36 AM on August 7, 2008.

A person could get the impression that the Washington Post hates to see regular people with retirement security.

Consider that they want to raid their production workers' pension fund as a precondition to negotiating over giving them their first raise in five years. Consider that last October, an unsigned editorial harshed on Hillary Clinton for not wanting to "fix" a system that was "not sustainable," or that this July, one of their reporters misrepresented Obama's and McCain's positions on Social Security in order to suggest that everyone believes the system is "fragile." Consider their in-house columnist, Ruth Marcus.

Marcus was sitting on a panel this March when she declared that the 10 smartest Democrats and 10 smartest Republicans could fix Social Security in two hours if they were all put in a room together for that purpose. Is she ignorant of the fact that the 10 smartest Republicans have spent the last few years trying to dismantle Social Security? One would hope not. She is a DC-based political columnist for the Washington Post, after all.

She might also have noticed that the Republican plan to turn Social Security into an oxymoron by replacing it with the stock market (Does she ever read the business section of the paper she works for?) was universally unpopular with seniors, people who will be seniors in short order, and people who plan on growing up to be seniors someday. If she did know, she neglected to mention it.

Today, Marcus had fun bashing Social Security in the Post's pages once again, while taking swipes at Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a book review, emphasis mine:

... Yet [Pelosi biographer Marc] Sandalow seems reluctant to abandon the drilled-in objectivity of the daily news reporter for the analytical eye of the biographer; he refrains from making any judgments. "Pelosi regarded stopping President Bush's Social Security plan as her biggest triumph as Democratic leader," he writes -- with no assessment of the merits of Pelosi's determination not to offer an alternative to Bush's private accounts. Pelosi herself is proud of that approach, crafted with the help of marketing experts who advised downtrodden Democrats going up against President Bush: "You can't compete unless you take him down a few pegs first."

Democrats listened. "In spite of repeated criticisms from the inside-the-Beltway crowd" -- true confessions, I was one of them -- "that we should have our own plan, our strategy worked," she crows. ...

They do say that a public confession is the first step on the road to recovery. Good luck with that.

Moving on, the Democrats had, have, a great Social Security plan. It's called Social Security. It's subtitled, "Keep your venal, grubby paws off our public pension system. We're all very happy with it, thanks."

It was inaugurated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, you may have heard of him, and has been a permanent hit ever since its introduction. Even Republicans wouldn't have thought, until fairly recently, of trying to dismantle it. As Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, (Woohoo, Bipartisan Wisdom!) once said:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security ... you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are ... a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

There's more history, but it isn't important right now, and I've been told that many pressitarians have short attention spans anyway. They can only follow a few, simple points spelled out in basic declarative sentences. (The pressitarians would say instead that the problem is 'The public can't follow more complicated arguments', but in exactly the way that other people sometimes go to a doctor and say that 'A friend has a problem, what advice should I pass on?' To which the reply is supposed to be, 'Tell your friend to get a checkup.')

More recently, Republicans like George W. Bush and John McCain decided that they didn't have to listen to Ike anymore. They tried to make their own reality. One where, like John McCain does, you can trash Social Security as a "broken" "disgrace," but still accept $1,930 a month in benefits ... and expect that your friends at the major newspapers will never bother to care.

McCain could give that money back, but I guess it's trivial. He'd only be able to afford three pairs of $520 shoes a month on that sort of chump change, and there wouldn't be nearly enough left over to pay upkeep on a single one of his family mansions. No wonder he thinks the system doesn't work.

Though in spite of those stupid Republicans trying to confuse everyone, it's come to public attention that there is no Social Security crisis. In fact, Social Security is fine.

It would be nice then if the Washington Post and Ruth Marcus would stop lying to people and telling us that Social Security is broken. They sound like John McCain, when he manages to get his story straight, that is. Please stop trying to provide cover for your greedy friends who want to steal from our public pension system with one hand and dole out corporate welfare to lazy companies with the other.

And if you can't, take your elitist disregard for public welfare and shove it right up your ink barrel.

Tagged as: mccain, hillary clinton, social security, fdr washington post, ruth marcus