DWT exclusive! Now it can be told: David S. Broder has been mounted and stuffed for decades. You won't believe who's writing "his" columns!

McCranky -- a reformer in the mold of T.R., says David S.

"So, at 72 and with a history of cancer, how could McCain choose a vice presidential nominee who has, let's face it, zero experience in foreign affairs? Being the nominal commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard doesn't count, unless you think Vladimir Putin is about to order an invasion across the Bering Strait.

"At a time when the nation also confronts enormous challenges at home, Palin has, um, slightly more than zero experience in domestic affairs. The reason most people move to Alaska is that it's different from the rest of the country. Salmon fishing and snowmobile racing are not front-page news in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida."

-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today, The Cynicism Express

"Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than [Harriet] Miers was for the [Supreme C]ourt. But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests, which means she is unlikely to suffer Miers's fate. . . .

"That only a handful of conservatives have so far expressed doubts about Palin demonstrates that ideology is what drove them during the Miers fight, and drives them still. Miers's lack of experience was, for many conservatives, a convenient rationale for opposing someone they worried might become another David Souter. Palin's lack of experience is irrelevant because she is right -- actually, quite far right -- on the conservatives' issues."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washinton Post column yesterday, Northern Underexposure

"How Palin Could Help"

-- title of the column attributed to "David S. Broder" in yesterday's Washington Post

by Ken
EXCLUSIVE TO DOWN WITH TYRANNY

To the extent that the media do their job, there is one basic take on the choice of Governor Who??? to be Young Johnny McCranky's running mate, and that is that the Crankyman has chosen to take a flying leap into history as a laughingstock, as the least-fit-to-serve candidate ever to make it onto the presidential ballots of all the states in the history of the republic, including minor as well as major party nutsos.

Really, now, while there are hundreds if not thousands of questions to be asked, and the number balloons every day, and many of those questions are pretty darned important, it all boils down to one question, really:

How would anyone in his or her right mind DARE to vote for a McCranky-Who??? ticket?

This is after all, a presidential candidate who appears on a host of medical grounds to be at death's door, or on some of his feebler days to have slipped inside the door for a quick liedown. And the person he has chosen to step in for him is someone who, apart from being a babe of sorts, has no qualifications of any kind for the presidency except loudly proclaimed commitment to a few ultra-right-wing (in particular Christian Right) talking points. She doesn't even qualify as an "ultra-right-winger," since on most of the issues confronting the president of the U.S. -- including the whole realm of foreign policy, but hardly limited to that -- she has, as far as we can tell, no views at all.

But the Crankyman was desperate, and knew he needed to roll the dice. So he apparently gambled that, since he couldn't have his buddy Holy Joe Lieberman at his side, he'd go the other way: to a complete stranger, known only for (a) being a former beauty near-queen (hey, people like good-looking people) and (b) espousing a few Hard Right crazinesses that might solidify his support among the crazies and stoopids who make up the Republican Base, whose trust he is incredibly still trying to win at this late date.

And so as we scan yesterday and today's op-ed pages in the hometown newspaper of Our Nation's Village, that tiny enclave that sometimes seems to exist in the mind and nowhere else (unless it's Our Nation's Lobbyists' money-shoveling operations), we find sensible people like Eugene Robinson and E. J. Dionne Jr. writing sensibly, and even the likes of Richard Cohen sort of getting it. And then there's "David S. Broder" [left], taking the side of, well the crazies and the stoopids, the people our Johnny is forging into a coalition he dares to dream will propel him into the White House.

Which is why it seems to me long past time to rip the cover off the charade. People, there is no David S. Broder.

Oh, there once was a David S. He was a harmless drone who churned out dull but inoffensive platitudes about American politics.

David S.'s most famous innovation, of course, was his cherished Field Trips into the Real America -- for the purpose of communing with his belly button. He was rarely given proper credit for his courage in undertaking these field trips, which carried with them the risk of running into Real People, who might actually say Real Stuff.

Of course our David S. was tough enough for that. He had been to zoos, after all, and so had experience observing native fauna in their not-quite-natural habitat. Sometimes he would, in flagrant violation of the posted warnings not to feed the animals, toss them the odd peanut.

What's more, it's not as if David S. was at risk of hearing something from those natives that might disturb the stone-engraved "wisdom" drawn from all that belly-button watching. After all, the last time he was known to have listened to anyone who wasn't a certified elder of his Village-by-the-Potomac was sometime in the early 1970s when his mother reproached him for not calling more often and he shot back, "Jeez Louise, Ma, I'm due at Sally Quinn's. Her cook is trying a new recipe for Quiche Villageoise."

What's more, encountering these rough Real Persons in the wild (as it were), in their luncheonettes and bars, relieved him of the lurking fear that one of those ruffians might someday show up at his very own Village doorstep with a view toward actually setting foot inside! (Oh, the horror!)

So yes, there once was a David S., but surely it has been obvious that he no longer exists, and surely hasn't for decades. Although it appears impossible to ascertain when exactly David S. moved on to the Great Punditorium in the Beyond, there really isn't room for doubt that he has passed.

"Are you going to tell me," said Milton S. Tumblewit, professor emeritus of punditology at the Outside the Village University School of Journalism, "that these last several decades' worth of mindlessly repetitive and predictable pseudo-'centrist' drivel were written by an actual living, breathing human being?"

Many of those who were once close to David S. acknowledge that the Master, as he liked to be called, is no longer with them. One longtime intimate, who was granted anonymity on account of he's a really famous Village columnist who lacks the common sense or decency or simple shame to be mortified by this remembrance, nevertheless recalls:

I remember once I went into a phase where I became really preoccupied with finding the True Political Center -- not some close approximation, but the real, exact center. I knew as long as I was even millimeters away from True Center, I couldn't give my readers the real American punditry they deserve. So my desk filled up with protractors and compasses and T-squares and slide rules and stuff.

Until one day David S. (he liked to be called"David S." -- either that or 'Master') said to me in that special authoritative way he had, where you knew he was telling you God's Own Truth, he said, 'You don't need all that fancy paraphernalia, boychik. If you want to find the Real Center, just keep moving right until you feel your head spinning like a hula hoop on crack.'

I love to tell that story at Village soirees. I swear every time I tell it it brings a tear to Ben Bradlee's eye."

There is, it should be noted, a dissenting school, which acknowledges that the writing of David S.'s columns passed into other hands at some point, probably in the '70s, but insists that he didn't die.

THE REVISIONIST THEORY: DAVID S., CHANTEUSE

Instead he is said to have let his hair and nails grow, and after several seasons of summer stock rolled out his one-man show, Mary Martin, Mary Martin, in which he attempted to recapture the spirit of America's favorite singing gamine. Adherents of this theory point out that David S. had already achieved great acclaim playing two of the beloved Mary's most famous roles with the Village Light Opera Company (admission by invitation only): the title role of Peter Pan and the irrepressible young governess Maria in The Sound of Music, where he was especially admired for his yodeling in the song "The Lonely Goatherd."

Upon his passing, the real David S. was mounted and stuffed, and an amazing number of people appear to have been fooled. The result bears an uncanny likeness to Phineas T. Bluster of the old Howdy Doody show. How then, you ask, has the Washington Post continued to publish a never-ending stream of mindless blather under the David S. byline?

A now-retired but formerly highly placed source at the paper agreed to spill the beans to Down With Tyranny, on condition of anonymity ("I wouldn't dare show my face at Sally's house," he -- or she -- said).

A lot of people think we just had that crap written by an intern, maybe one who had once had to retype several of his columns when the spam filter on our e-mail system deleted them. Or more likely a succession of interns, on the theory that no one person could keep churning out that dim-witted crap.

The truth is actually more exotic.

You've probably heard of the theory that a whole bunch of monkeys -- you know, a really, really lot of them -- put at typewriters would eventually type the works of Shakespeare. This is usually thought of as a mere theoretical comment on randomness. It's not well known that a project to test the theory was actually funded in the late '60s and early '70s by the National Endowment for the Humanities, using 500 monkeys working on early IBM PCs (and not as is sometimes maliciously reported, PC Jr.'s).

In fact, the project achieved some surprising successes. Most notably, two of the simians in collaboration produced a version of Julius Caesar that was surprisingly similar to the one we know, at least up to the point where the stabbed Caesar turns to his erstwhile friend Brutus and says, "Et tu, Bongo?" At this point the whole thing deteriorated quickly into farce, in the form of scampering, howling antics that closely resembled a routine once done by a pair of trained chimpanzees named Biffy and Miffy on The Ed Sullivan Show. Or at least that was the claim advanced by Biffy and Miffy's trainer, Col. Beeson M. Mifflin, in legal papers that were filed as a prelude to a possible lawsuit.

Some people claim that the threatened lawsuit spelled doom for the Simian Shakespeare project. In fact, it was shut down when the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) [right], alarmed by reports of the project's successes, succeeded in cutting off funding, insisting: "It's bad enough that filth was written once. We're certainly not going to having it written again on the taxpayers' dime, and especially not by a bunch of monkeys who are no smarter than me!"

With the monkeys thrown out of work, and re-employment prospects bleak (the Sullivan show was off the air by then), we at the Post knew we could probably get them to work cheap. What we weren't prepared for was how quickly and how successfully some of the monkeys -- the more pedantic ones, it has to b said, who were usually derided by their more creative peers -- developed a remarkable imitation of David S.'s "voice." When the first "Broder" book written entirely by the monkeys was published and several Washington reviewers declared, "Rejoice, Real Americans! The Master has never been in more iconic form," we ordered extra bananas for all of the team.

And so here we are, in September 2008, and yesterday we had E. J. Dionne writing:

By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week's (now-delayed) Republican convention against John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate -- for the same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush's selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

And today Eugene Robinson noting:

Has anyone noticed that Sarah Palin's central claim to political fame is a fraud? She represents herself as a fiscal conservative who abhors pork-barrel projects and said no thanks to the "Bridge to Nowhere" -- a $398 million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska, to its airport across the Tongass Narrows. But as mayor of Wasilla (pop. 9,780), she hired a Washington lobbyist to bring home the bacon. And as a candidate for governor just two years ago, she supported both the Ketchikan bridge and the congressional earmark that would have paid most of its cost.

But then there was David S., or rather the David S. Monkey Collective, writing "How Palin Could Help."

By picking Palin, McCain has strengthened his reputation not as an ideologue, not as a partisan, but as a reformer -- ready to shake up Washington as his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, once did. My guess is that cleansing Washington of its poisonous partisanship, its wasteful spending and its incompetence will become McCain's major theme.

Now, this is -- and I wish there were a more polite way of saying it -- so fucking stupid, in every particular, that if it had been written by an actual pundit, you'd have to say it would be a simple act of human kindness to take him out to the meadow and put him out of his misery.

Of course we know who really wrote it. And I for one refuse to attempt to engage a bunch of monkeys in political dialogue. It's likely to be more stimulating and productive than dialoguing with, say, the Crazies and Stoopids for McCranky. Still, there are limits.

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