Missing Mary McGrory (SPEW ALERT)

The Washington Post ^ | 1-4-04 | David S. Broder

[Flux Capacitor]

I am headed out this week for my 12th presidential campaign, but unlike the first 11, I will not have the company of my favorite traveling companion, Mary McGrory. The great liberal columnist, surely the most elegant newspaper writer Americans have read over the past half-century, has been ill since last March and recently accepted the generous buyout offer given to veteran employees by The Post. Incomprehensible as it seems, she has finished her journalistic career.

Traveling the campaign trail with McGrory was an experience like no other. When I had the good fortune to be hired in 1960 by the old Washington Star, where she was already established, I quickly learned that covering candidates with McGrory meant mixing a little bit of reporting with a lot of redcap service. Mary expected -- and needed -- porters, and no one, from famous network anchors to rookies like myself, was exempt from carrying her bags. Your thanks were a gracious smile and often an invitation to join her in the comfortable car that smart campaigns provided (usually with the candidate aboard) while the rest of the pack rode the bus....

....Mary was equally fixed in her political views. She hated war and injustice and cherished the citizens and politicians who opposed them. She had a limited tolerance for Republicans. I remember once going on at some length about a Republican I admired (perhaps George Romney), reciting his virtues and accomplishments. McGrory listened until I finally stopped and then replied with one word: "Really?" It was pronounced with a mixture of politesse and skepticism that Katharine Graham herself would have envied....

[Flux Capacitor]

----"Incomprehensible as it seems, [McGrory] has finished her journalistic career."----

Sounds to me like journalism just took a giant step forward.

Mary McGrory so cherished the little people.... after all, someone had to carry her bags....

-Dan

[Support Free Republic]

Without the support of Freeper donations, Free Republic would go belly-up, leaving guys like The French Gynecologist to be unopposed. And we can't have that!

[Howlin]

They sound like a cult, don't they?

[William McKinley]

I am sorry that she suffered a stroke.

But she was a partisan hack pretending to be a journalist.

[Archangelsk]

If a lady politely asked you to carry her bags would you refuse? I don't see anything wrong with this tribute. Perhaps I miss the more genteel times that Broder writes about.

[OpusatFR]

Who can forget her screed on 911? She wrote that President Bush stayed in the air because he was a coward who was afraid to land.

She's a slavering, leftist fool. She's one of the elite journalists who achieved her "journalist's" credentials simply because she touted the left's line. She never deviated from rants and hyperbole tarring conservatives with any manner of false attributes and agendas. Her slanted, bigoted, nasty-minded writing is NOT missed.

[Flux Capacitor]

----If a lady politely asked you to carry her bags would you refuse?----

She would not have to ask me to begin with. But it's a pretty big leap from that to the haughty demands of queenlike treatment that Mary McGrory, like so many limousine libs, made of her colleagues.

These people are all alike.

-Dan

[Flux Capacitor]

----Who can forget her screed on 911? She wrote that President Bush stayed in the air because he was a coward who was afraid to land.----

Coincidentally enough, Broder wrote pretty much the same thing in one of his columns.

Broder: "She concluded that despite what she feared was coming, "we can celebrate St. Patrick's Day." But before it came, she suffered a stroke, which left this marvelous writer, never at a loss for the right word, with a tongue that will not obey the commands her brain sends."

Yep. God knows what he's doing.

-Dan

[trek]

What? What? Is David Broder suggesting that star reporter Mary McGory has a political bias!?! In the words of Inspector Renault, I am shocked! shocked! to find that the queen of the Washington press corps is now recognized as a rabid partisan. Why is it we only hear admissions of this bias now that she is retired?

The same game was played with Saint Walter of Cronkite. Only NOW do we find that 'the most trusted man in America' was a Democrat Party hack.

Thank God for the internet and talk radio. These two new institutions are single handedly saving what's left of the First Amendment.

[Noumenon]

Another enemy of human freedom down.

[NYCVirago]

Mary McGrory's nephew wrote a tribute column to her a few months ago, where he talked about how politicans who came to talk to her were put to work in her garden. Isn't there something a tad unethical about a reporter who uses her position to turn those around her into servants?

[nightdriver]

"She hated war and injustice and cherished the citizens and politicians who opposed them."

That is, unless, the perpetrators of aformentioned war were her socialist buddies in places like China, Cuba or the USSR.

She was nothing more than a subversive socialist, who, like many of her comrades, learned to use American openness and freedoms to her advantage in trying to destroy it.

[brooklin]

t least she got some work out of the politicians for her money.

[M-cubed]

the haughty demands of queenlike treatment that Mary McGrory, like so many limousine libs, made of her colleagues.

These people are all alike.<<.......So true!!...they have such a false sense of superiority that it is impossible for them to even consider, let alone understand anothers point of view...That's why its impossible to argue with them!..they will never actually consider the point being made..their self esteem and ego is so tightly tied to their own views that to change a view whould completely collapse that self indulged sense of superiority..

[MamaB]

Never, ever heard of her! Did I miss anything?

[Lazamataz]

But she was a partisan hack pretending to be a journalist

As Broder verifies, here: She had a limited tolerance for Republicans.

[GladesGuru]

Just a minor correction, but wasn't she "never at a loss for the 'far left' word" instead of the 'right' word?

Or an I remembering another socialist harridan?

[jmaroneps37]

mcgrory is a low life piece of dog crap. People like her are the reason why we have had to do so much work to straighten this country out.

[GreatOne]

Journalism is now better off with her absence.

Hey, where's the sea hag photo of her (that was a good kiddie show, btw)?

[KC_Conspirator]

McGrory is a hateful leftist, second only to Helen Thomas herself (Maybe Molly Ivins). I cannot say that I am upset at her condition.