The gaffe-prone Randell Beck, executive editor of the Argus Leader, seems to have committed yet another one. A week and a half ago, Beck wrote a column about going to a "froufrou coffee house" to "chat" with a "South Dakota politician," and while doing so, noticing a group of city council members "lurking in a dark corner."
Today, Vernon Brown, one of the victims of the Beck sighting, responded to Beck's column with some intriguing new facts that Beck conveniently omitted from his column. The "South Dakota politician" Beck was "chatting" with was none other than Democratic U.S. Senator Tim Johnson. As Brown writes:
"In fact, Beck and another editor were meeting the senator for what appeared to be an awfully friendly coffee. I could assume Beck might be the one with an agenda, but I won't."
(Emphasis added.) Hmmm. Could this meeting between Beck, another AL editor (Patrick Lalley?) and Sen. Johnson qualify as a cabal of yahoos? Perhaps they were discussing the best way to phrase the AL's forthcoming endorsement of Senator Daschle.
Fittingly, the Weekly Standard's Joseph Bottum has a piece this week in which he notes that the Argus Leader's profile of Senator Johnson in 2002 was "so puffy and sweet it should be handed out in journalism school as a model of disingenuous advocacy." Perhaps this explains that "awfully friendly coffee."
Here's a photo of Vernon Brown's response to Randell Beck in today's edition of the Argus Leader:
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