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What You Should Think, Straight From Washington Examiner

This weekend, we took on the task of wading through the Washington Examiner‘s opinion section, mostly so you don’t have to. Here’s a taste of what we found.

Off with her head?

In an editorial, the Examiner parses the vast differences between “taking responsibility” and taking “the blame” — noting that while Hillary Clinton has “taken responsibility” for the death of diplomats in Benghazi, she has not actually taken “blame” and this is a big problem. The latter, it seems, would’ve resulted in something far more horrible than the collective sigh from likely 2016 voters polling has revealed, something more akin to… Ned Stark’s fate on Game of Thrones? We’re exaggerating, but that only seems appropriate when describing 524 words devoted to the huge, colossal and completely imaginary gulf between two phrases that mean the exact same thing. And to be fair, this wasn’t even an original Examiner thought. They were just piggy-backing on a piece in USAToday by blogger Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

See the others…

French-fried fiasco

Robert Maranto, author of President Obama and Education Reformhad the shock of his life when he took his kids to McDonald’s last week: “Near her chicken nuggets, nestled beside the plastic-like apple slices — I mean, who goes to McDonalds for the fruit? — was an itsy bitsy cardboard French-Fry box filled to the brim with 13 tiny fries.” 13. They counted them, so we know the number is accurate. And here’s the real horror… this happened on Memorial Day. Memorial Day! For this, his dad fought the Wehrmacht in World War II? (There is some kind of connection between this fast food travesty and war and the general decline of the United States, we think, just not one Maranto is able to make in any way remotely understandable). The takeaway, if you want to hone it down, is that it’s a jumbled mess of nonsense. We end with the idea that if you think eating at McDonald’s is a healthy lifestyle choice, 13 fries or not, you’ll die from lighting a match next to a gasoline pump long before the food gets you, anyway.

Metro is off the rails

Finally, a piece we can get behind. It’s another editorial, but a local one this time warning of Metro’s ability to mostly escape liability for things like breaking a guy’s ribs and leaving the floors slippery wet. It’s a clear piece with succinct connections that don’t create imaginary chasms or lament the down-sizing of a McDonald’s happy meal as political scandal. Most importantly, it makes a good point: as long as Metro doesn’t get in trouble for its safety lapses, it will probably never care about being safer.

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