Today, in a post­ing on his “Rough Sketch” blog at the Wash­ing­ton Post Dana Mil­bank per­pe­trated one of the most grotesque exam­ples of hatchet jour­nal­ism I’ve seen in a while. I’ll get to the par­tic­u­lars soon enough, but first it’s worth set­ting a little context.

Mil­bank was report­ing on the Rev­erend Jere­miah Wright’s speech at the National Press Club this morn­ing, a speech that marked the third public appear­ance of Barack Obama’s former pastor in the last couple of days. The first appear­ance came on Friday, when Wright appeared in a PBS inter­view with Bill Moyers. The second came yes­ter­day, when he spoke at the Detroit NAACP’s Free­dom Fund dinner.

The Moyers inter­view was so uncon­tro­ver­sial that one com­men­ta­tor had to wonder why we hadn’t heard more about it. But the question-and-answer period after today’s Press Club speech gave the media just the kind of thing it was wait­ing for. Joe Klein of Time said that “Wright’s pur­pose now seems quite clear: to aggran­dize him­self–the guy is going to be a go-​to main­stream media source for racial extrem­ist spew, the next iter­a­tion of Al Sharp­ton–and destroy Barack Obama.” Amy Sul­li­van, also at Time, said bluntly that Wright’s per­for­mance at the National Press Club “can only be described as a polit­i­cal disaster.”

Only small-t time will tell if Sul­li­van is right–one sign she’s cor­rect is that Obama is already inch­ing his way onto the denounce-and-reject road. [UPDATE 4/29: The inches have become miles.] But it only takes one look at the tran­script of Wright’s appear­ance at the Press Club to see that Klein’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of it as “racial extrem­ist spew” is ridiculous.

Milbank’s post is worst of all.

Photos from the Randy Rogers Band show at Joe’s last week are up here.

Today, while clean­ing house, I came across a cache of older mag­a­zines ripe for recy­cling and spot­ted this head­line on a copy of the May 2006 Harper’s: “The New Road to Serf­dom: An Illus­trated Guide to the Coming Real Estate Col­lapse, by Michael Hudson.” Curi­ous, I looked inside, and sure enough found this item of star­tling prescience:

With the real estate boom, the great mass of Amer­i­cans can take on colos­sal debt today and real­ize colos­sal cap­i­tal gains–and the con­comi­tant ren­tier life of leisure–tomor­row. If you have the where­withal to fill out a mort­gage appli­ca­tion, then you need never work again. What could be more invit­ing–or, for that matter, more egalitarian?

That’s the pitch, anyway. The real­ity is that, although home own­er­ship may be wise choice for many people, this par­tic­u­lar real estate bubble has been care­fully engi­neered to lure home buyers into cir­cum­stances detri­men­tal to their own best inter­ests. The bait is easy money. The trap is a modern equiv­a­lent to peon­age, a life­time spent work­ing to pay off debt on an asset of rapidly dwin­dling value.

Most every­one involved in the real estate bubble thus far has made at least a few dol­lars. But that is about to change. The bubble will burst, and when it does, the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a land­lord will soon find that what they really signed up for was the hard servi­tude of debt serfdom.

It doesn’t sur­prise me that this arti­cle left no mental trace if and when I came across it two years ago. Its sub­ject and style are so com­pletely of a piece with the the kind of eco­nomic arti­cles that one expects from Harper’s that I prob­a­bly gave it no more heed than I’ve given sim­i­lar exam­ples from this month’s issue (Wen­dell Berry’s “Faustian Eco­nom­ics: Hell hath no limits” and Kevin Phillips’s “Numbers Racket: Why the econ­omy is worse than we know”). In fact, if I’ve got one real crit­i­cism of the Harper’s edi­to­r­ial approach to policy sub­jects, it’s this: their authors cry wolf so often that it’s nigh impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate the sig­nals from the noise.

And yet you’ve got to hand it to Hudson: writ­ing two years ago–one full year before anyone had really begun to wonder about the state of the real estate market–he got things exactly right. Check out his web­site for some of his more recent work.

Donald R. Dia­mond, an Ari­zona real estate devel­oper and major fundraiser for John McCain’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, speak­ing about a devel­op­ment project at Fort Ord for which McCain pro­vided a letter of sup­port on his behalf (empha­sis mine):

I think this is what Con­gress people are sup­posed to do for constituents…. When you have a big, sig­nif­i­cant busi­ness­man like myself, why wouldn’t you want to help move things along? What else would they do? They waste so much time with legislation.