Murray Waas has a very long post in TPM (2610 words) titled “The Big Stone Wall: Nine Bush-Era Officials Refused To Cooperate With DOJ Probes“. TPM is promoting this at the top of their home page as an “exclusive”.

I waded doggedly through the first ten paragraphs or so, without finding anything that struck me as new information or insightful analysis. At that point, I decided to cut my losses (thereby saving myself from wading through 38 more paragraphs.)

If Waas had managed to restrain himself, and keep it to 400 words or so, it might have been possible to describe the post as a useful summary of what is already well-known. But why Waas and TPM find it useful to rehash at such tedious length what is already well-known baffles the hell out of me.

Maybe there was lots of good stuff after the first ten paragraphs. If so, the joke’s clearly on me. But that would make Waas a really crappy writer (whether he considers himself a journalist or a blogger). And whoever vets and approves such stories at TPM a really crappy editor.