I’m being quite literal and quite serious here. His job is to cover the media and opine about their role in our society. He has written something yesterday that shows pretty clearly that he’s not fit to continue in that job. Here’s Digby’s take on Kurtz’s most recent column:

Howie Kurtz published a lengthy excerpt of my post of yesterday in which I indicted the press corps for being susceptible to the particular types of nasty little smears and tidbits the Republicans specialize in and those end up setting the agenda for coverage. The excerpt ended with this from my post:

“The press, therefore, will go to great lengths to protect the people who give them what they crave, most of whom happen to be Republicans since character smears are their very special talent. There was a reason why Rove and Libby used ‘the wife sent him on a boondoggle’ line. Stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage are the coin of the realm.Why we see so little of the same kind of feeding frenzies on the other side isn’t hard to fathom. Nobody is spoon-feeding them to the press with just the kind of cutesy meanness they prefer.”

His comment, in its entirety, was this:

I agree that leakers often get to set the story line, but I also know that Democrats are not unfamiliar with the practice. (Remember the Bush DUI leak just before the 2000 election?) And those who leaked information about domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons also had an impact.

Can everyone see what’s wrong with that picture? I knew that you could.

To lay this out in bullets so I don’t bore everyone:

• There’s no evidence that those leaks were from Democrats (unless Kurtz knows more than he’s letting on).
• More importantly, the Abu Ghraib, CIA prisons, and domestic surveillance leaks all were about government business and not gossip. The most reasonable explanation of them is that they were whistleblowing leaks aimed at stopping government overreach.

Even the best interpretation of the false accusations about the Frost family shows it to be a malicious leak and malicious coverage. It was based on falsehoods and assumptions. There was no public interest served in making those leaks public. Even if the Democrats “benefitted” from the coverage of CIA prisons and torture, there was an obvious public interest in covering those stories. (Digby points out evidence that the Bush DUI leak didn’t seem to originate with Democrats, nor did it originate with someone abusing their powers in the government).

Kurtz has no idea what the role of the press is. If he sees gossip and innuendo about a family as the equivalent of the Abu Ghraib leaks, he’s not fit to report about journalism. Get him covering the local Little League teams in the D.C. area. Politics and journalism are clearly out of his league.

Update: More at Pandagon…

Update 2: Even more at Greenwald’s blog at Salon, including a list of the sources for the leaks mentioned above. Hint: none are Democratic operatives…