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Jason Zengerle takes a bad blog post by Tom Ricks based on a silly article from the Washington Post and somehow divines a "civil-military culture clash" in the White House. Er, what?It starts with the WaPo article, which discusses the lives of White House staffers, who get up early and go to bed late and work all day. It's an article written every four to eight years, and it's never particularly interesting. I doubt the piece was solicited by the White House press staff. But if you ask someone who's been working eighteen hours a day for six months with no vacation whether they're tired, they probably say, yeah, I am. The article does not talk about any military-civilian tension. Then we get to Tom Ricks, who reads the piece, hops on his high horse and writes,
I know a lot of infantrymen who would love to have the soft life these people have. I think this sort of mewling is what happens when you staff the White House mainly with people who think the hardest thing you can do in life is take the bar exam. No wonder Jim Jones, the national security advisor, looks so unhappy -- he probably would like to grab a few lapels and tell them about his life as a Marine platoon leader in Vietnam.No one in the article even remotely compared themselves to soldiers serving abroad. If they had been asked by a reporter to do so, they no doubt would have said that their work pales in comparison to the sacrifices of those serving in the military abroad. Here we have Tom Ricks, empirical reporter, happily deploying stereotypes about people he has never met -- he should be embarrassed. If someone had offered similarly ignorant observations about soldiers from reading one article, Ricks would be furious. I admire Ricks' past work as a reporter, but so far as I know he's never done public service of any kind, so maybe he should appreciate the work these "soft" people do on his behalf.Just to add insult to injury, next we have Zengerle, who reads Ricks' post and decides that maybe there's discord to come between the civilian and military officials in the White House. This is based, of course, on no reporting. It's based on Ricks getting into high dudgeon because staffers working overtime in the White House told a reporter they're tired.
-- Tim Fernholz
