Today’s Washington Post has three prominent op-ed pieces. Mark Winne writes,

During my tenure in Hartford, I often wondered what would happen if the collective energy that went into soliciting and distributing food were put into ending hunger and poverty instead…Put all the emergency food volunteers and staff and board members from across the country on buses to Washington, to tell Congress to mandate a living wage, health care for all and adequate employment and child-care programs.

Andi Zeisler writes,

I can confidently say that I want my next president to be a b—, and that goes for men and women. Outspoken? Check. Commanding? Indeed. Unworried about pleasing everybody? Sure. Won’t bow to pressure to be “nice”? You bet.

Tyler Cowen writes,

We still haven’t secured our ports against nuclear terrorism. The $1 trillion we’ve probably spent on the war could have funded the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security 28 times over.

So the Post’s left-wing readers are having a nice, comfortable breakfast. They are reading that charity is bad and government is good. They are reading that Democrats should not be nice, and that the next President should be “commanding” and angry. Finally, they are re-reading one of the hoariest anti-war talking points, which is that the money instead would have been spent on domestic security measures.

A famous newspaperman said that his goal was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Today’s Post pieces all serve to comfort the comfortable. That is, they reinforce the ideological predispositions of the readers. When I open up the Post and see a piece by Tyler on whether we should replace charity with government or whether we need a nasty, commanding President, that will be a man-bites-dog story.