Washington Post Op-Ed Columnist Michael Gerson Sticks a Shiv in Obama

Back when I was in medical school, one attending was said to be so lethal that on rounds he could cut off your head and you wouldn't even know it till your chin hit your chest.

Michael Gerson — or perhaps the Post's headline writer, now that I think about it, or maybe the two of them working together — today snuck one in that made me smile with admiration at its subtle display of subliminal mastery.

Long story short: The headline of Gerson's trashtalking piece dissing Obama (gee, why are we not surprised? But I digress), "Pressure and the Prophet," is shown above, as it appears on the Op-Ed page under a picture of Obama.

Then we read the piece, which essentially tells us that in Gerson's opinion Obama was a flip-flopper on his now-essential-to-his-electability stance against the war in Iraq.

The prophet reference in the headline is to this line in the column: "For many Democrats, this prescience has given Obama the aura of a prophet."

Huh.

For the life of me, it's hard not to believe that I'm not the only person glancing at the headline who thought, oh, here we go again, Barrack Hussein Obama, student at a school in Jakarata, Indonesia from ages 6-10 "where classes were taught in Indonesian" (nudge, nudge), blah blah blah.

Give it a rest, already.

This kind of thing is why many, if not most, people laugh as they read punditry.

I guess Gerson, as the Post's resident righty along with Charles Krauthammer, owes it to his constituency.

But really, isn't "mostly say hooray for our side" really, really long past dated?

Wanna know what I think?

I think the Post is really smarting over the New York Times having swooped in and run point on the whole Spitzer affair (even linking to "Kristen's" MySpace page before it was taken down) whose ground zero, Washington, D.C.'s Mayflower Hotel, is within walking distance of Post headquarters.

Speaking of which, Murdoch's New York Post kind of dropped its ball there for a while, what, ceding the buzz to the Gray Lady?