Following news that billionaire Amazon.com founder Jeffrey Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250 million, and will probably have to lay a lot of people off to save that left-of-center Hindenburg, I imagine the WaPo office is rife with paranoia and desperate jockeying for job survival. Here are six worthless Washington Post employees who should be canned Post-haste:
1. Ezra Klein
As this chart clearly demonstrates, seeing blogger Ezra Klein’s smug, paste-eating face on television makes the average American 34 percent more likely to sigh deeply, crack open a Mike’s Hard Lemonade, sit down on the floor of a studio apartment, and stare at a plaster wall for extended periods of time. Studies from the nonpartisan Brookings Institution also find that bitterly pulling out U.S. high school yearbooks, calling U.S. ex-girlfriends and hanging up when they answer, and/or taking long drives on U.S. highways to “just think things over” increase by 26 percent following Klein’s MSNBC appearances.
Note: Figures cited above are not scientific.
2. Jennifer Rubin
There are a few things faux-conservative “Right Turn” columnist Jennifer Rubin really hates: sunsets, young love, the smiles of children, basically all anti-war libertarians, and especially Chuck Hagel. When Hagel was up for Defense Secretary, Rubin broke the year’s biggest scoop – the one about intellectual dishonesty in the neoconservative movement: “Equally troubling to those who have taken a forceful stand against Castro’s dictatorship in Cuba, however, has been his dismissive attitude toward the Castros and his enthusiasm to end the U.S. embargo with no quid pro quo…Hagel has worked assiduously in favor of lifting the [Cuba] trade embargo.”
Fidel? No!!!
I was so scared I switched off “The Jack Paar Show” and hid under my desk, just like my school drills taught me to. Gee whiz, I said, if I make it through this one, I’ll never put my bubblegum cards in the spokes of my bike again!
3. Melinda Henneberger
Melinda Henneberger writes a feminist column entitled “She The People.” That’s the name of her column. “She The People.”
4. The entire sports page
“Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper went 2-for-5 in Saturday’s 7-4 win over the visiting Dodgers, hitting an RBI double up the middle in the bottom of the fifth to drive in the go-ahead run. ‘I was seeing the ball well today, and I got some good pitches,’ Harper said, raising further questions about the role of white male privilege in a patriarchal society dominated by harmful prevailing attitudes on…”
5. Bob Woodward
After winning the Pulitzer Prize and forcing Nixon to walk around the White House all night mumbling to old paintings for some reason, Post wonderboys Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein went their separate ways. Bernstein, the more colorful and dynamic reporter of the two, worked for ABC News a bit, dated Bianca Jagger and Elizabeth Taylor, married Nora Ephron and then a model, and inspired an entire screenplay about what a jerk he was. Woodward, the less awesome of the two, continued working for the Post and wrote a bunch of books about presidents that your dad owns but has never read. Staid, unexciting, a “stenographer to the stars” according to Christopher Hitchens, Woodward is the Washington Post. And now it’s over.
Let’s wrap it up here, Bob-o. We know it was Mark Felt. No one cares anymore.
6. Erik Wemple
Standing six-foot-eight and weighing in at 287 pounds, with a blonde crew cut and a gap-toothed smile, Wemple should barely be working at a mid-level brokerage firm, let alone the Washington Post. A Red Bull-chugging, stress ball-squeezing fellow who probably yells “Boom” after successfully throwing rolled-up paper into trash cans, Wemple is the big dog in a genre of local media reporting populated almost exclusively by 24-year old women (“Hey, I’m not complaining, bro,” he’d likely say while offering a sweaty high-five).
If Bezos has an ounce of business sense, he’ll send this Hamilton College frat-uncle back to the Buffalo Wild Wings bar area to whistle at waitresses and reminisce about the time he scooped Fishbowl on the news that City Paper would be adding more print ads.
Semper fi, Wemple. Semper fi.
Correction: An earlier version of this article named a handful of Washington Post employees deserving of being fired, but neglected to mention Post media critic Erik Wemple. We regret the error.
Are you a Washington Post employee with suggestions on which of your co-workers should be fired? Drop me a line and let me know!