The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin just wrote his last column for the paper. As you might recall, when the Post announced they were letting him go there was much rending of garments in the liberal blogosphere.

However, Froomkin was often criticized on some pretty legitimate grounds. He was clearly a liberal opinion columnist, as a opposed to a “news columnist” which was his given title at the Post. Further, the title of his column at the Post, “White House Watch,” suggested reporting, not opinion. Discerning whether Froomkin was a reporter or a liberal columnist was enough a problem that the Post’s ombudsman tackled the issue and found that other reporters at the paper felt that Froomkin was undermining the paper’s credibility:

John Harris, national political editor at the print Post, said, “The title invites confusion. It dilutes our only asset — our credibility” as objective news reporters. Froomkin writes the kind of column “that we would never allow a White House reporter to write. I wish it could be done with a different title and display.”

Yet, whenever Froomkin himself was pressed about having an underlying political agenda, he denied it. Even when he was caught red-handed — see this illuminating email exchange with Josh Trevino. Well, in his last column for the Post I guess Froomkin has thrown caution to the wind and decided to put all his cards on the table:

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn’t have and credibility he didn’t deserve. As it happens, it was on the day of my very first column that we also got the first insider look at the Bush White House, via Ron Suskind’s book, The Price of Loyalty. In it, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill described a disengaged president “like a blind man in a room full of deaf people”, encircled by “a Praetorian guard,” intently looking for a way to overthrow Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.
When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney’s lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby’s lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

Good to know he decided what the “dominant theme” of the Bush presidency was early on. Nope, no bias there.