In recent weeks, I have started following the Washington Nationals baseball team. I would not have predicted this, but there it is. The other day, some wanker Republicans in Congress threatened major league baseball for daring to consider selling the team to a Democrat. Sally Jenkins, a sportswriter at the Post, wrote about this disgusting and corrupt spectacle (in the sports section):

I do care when members of a ruling party start pushing people around, because next, it could be me. This is supposed to be the party that doesn't believe in government telling business or private citizens what to do. So here's what I have to say to Davis about that: Get your boot off my front porch, mister.

She actually did some digging and provided some context and, oh my, I think I've found an actual reporter in this city!

You can't help wondering what's behind the outrageous attack on Soros, who isn't even a major partner in the bid for the Nats. (Local entrepreneur Jon Ledecky is the real bidder.) Isn't it strange that rival bidder Fred Malek, the head of the Washington Baseball club, just happens to be a very big GOP fundraiser? And isn't it strange that, in a telephone interview, Davis went out of his way to praise Malek's bid? And isn't it strange that these attacks on Soros from Republicans came on the very day that Ledecky and his partners were being interviewed by MLB?

There's lots more good stuff. Go read the article.

And thus it was this morning that when I saw a Sally Jenkins byline on the Washington Post magazine's cover story on Howard Dean as chair of the DNC that I did not cringe. I read the article. It was actually quite fair. It was not dripping with condescension. It did not reek of that annoying cool-kids-club stench. It reads like she actually went, observed, listened, talked to people, and then tried to convey a complex subject as fairly as possible. You know, like a reporter. I disagree with her take here and there and think she got a couple of things wrong, but I am impressed and might even set a Google News alert on "Sally Jenkins".

Recently [Dean] had lunch with, as he described them, some "very old influential heavy-hitter lobbyists." They gently suggested that he ought to do more time in Washington.

"I can't," he said. "No votes in Washington."

That is the sort of smart and spiny thing Dean likes to say, and, when it's accompanied by rolled-up sleeves and a tie askew, he radiates a sense of possibility for his party. But he's also capable in the next instant of making a statement that forces staffers to roll their eyes and rush back to their offices to control the fallout.

[...] Jim Dean contends that his brother's habit of blurting things out results from the fact that, as governor, he continued to think and act like an everyday citizen. Dean, he says, is no different from you and me: Politics makes him angry. "Most Americans, of any political persuasion, get up in the morning and read the newspaper, and they get a little cranky about some of the stuff they read," he says. "I don't consider him any different."