I work in finance, so I usually read the Wall Street Journal every day. I don’t read the whole thing mind you, and one section I avoid like the plague is the editorial page. The Journal Editorial Board is located on the political spectrum just slightly to the left of Augusto Pinochet. And when I say slightly I mean you’d need a micrometer to measure the difference.

So I missed the Board’s little hissy fit blaming the Postal Service for Hurricane Katrina. Okay, maybe they didn’t actually blame the hurricane on us, but they might as well have. To hear the Journal tell it, the USPS has been sitting at home watching TV since the storm hit, and just started delivering mail again last week. Meanwhile, the Board would have you believe that UPS and FedEx have been tirelessly rebuilding the levees and resurrecting the dead.

And just to make sure they got your attention, our friends at the Journal headlined their little tirade ‘Going Postal’. Pretty funny, eh!

Let’s be charitable though- it must be difficult finding stuff to write about these days for the Journal folks. They had it easy back in the Clinton years. Sure, the economy was humming, there was a budget surplus, we weren’t invading countries, torturing prisoners or rolling back civil liberties, but there was Monica! Now, with the economy in a shambles, and Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ war going into its fourth year with no sign of an end, it’s kind of tough to find someone to rant against- the people screwing things up are the people you and your cronies bought and paid for. So why not pick on the Postal Service until you can come up with something better?

One thing I can’t figure out though- if the private sector would have been so much better at resuming mail service to New Orleans, why didn’t the Wall Street Journal lead the way by contracting with UPS or FedEx to take over the delivery of its mail subscriptions in the city?

Let’s see- could it be that even those selfless miracle workers might have wanted more than the 15 or so cents the Journal pays us? Or was it just that they couldn’t possibly have even attempted such a thing?

Probably both.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 10:24 pm and is filed under postal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.