Kesich Slams PPH Editorial

Things are getting awfully interesting at PPH and the other MaineToday properties.

First, all three papers had the temerity to criticize Maine's senators--apparently prompting Naomi Schalit, opinion editor at the KJ and Morning Sentinel, to resign.

And now, Greg Kesich, an editorial writer at PPH, is skewering his own paper's editorial position--explicitly--in the paper's own pages.

Tension, anyone?

But seriously: Kesich's trite, mushy paean to bipartisanship-over-substance is full of the kind of obsolete boilerplate that PPH would really be better off consigning to the Jeannine Guttman era.

Naturally, there's no acknowledgment in Kesich's column that the biggest mistake in recent US history--the Iraq war--was a quintessentially bipartisan project.

There's no concession that the popularity of Sen. Collins might depend, in part, on the junior senator's kid gloves treatment by Maine editors--who seem to have a more or less open invitation to join her staff.

And on the subject of health care in particular, there's no reckoning with the fact that decisive majorities in both chambers support the outlines of the Obama plan--and that if Sen. Snowe and Sen. Collins would simply forswear filibustering the legislation, it would be pretty much assured passage.

Finally, if Kesich wants a single-payer system--a bewildering admission, given what else he says here--his column inches would be better used laying out a nuts and bolts case for that approach.

He should be asking tough questions of his senators instead of blindly carrying water for them.