Washington Post pretty excited Hillary said 'black lives matter' and didn't hedge or anything

Every time I think media coverage of presidential politics can't get any more sad and pathetic, I come across something like this. Of course, the whole storyline concerning #blacklivesmatter and whether certain candidates utter the phrase in compliance with Official Leftist Orthodoxy has been around for much of this year. But there has rarely been a clearer demonstration than this of how left-wing activists lead political writers around by the nose, such that a certain Janell Ross actually thought she was writing about a worthwhile matter when she keyboard-vomited the following for the Washington Post:

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She said it. She really did. Actually she typed it. But still, there was no hedge. In a live Facebook Q&A set up primarily for average people interested in asking Hillary Clinton questions, some reporters popped in too. Ok, a lot of reporters popped in, since Clinton hasn't exactly been too open about taking questions from reporters. Among the online attendees was the Post's own, Wesley Lowery. Lowery asked Clinton this question and got this response: Lowrey questions Clinton "Black lives matter." With those three little words, Clinton acknowledged that there are myriad ways that race continues to shape life in America that have almost no relationship to pocketbooks, educational credentials or class. There's ample evidence that income, education and the like do not deliver the same results in black lives that they do in others. After three successive summers filled with news about the nation's rocky racial landscape, it's probably fair to say that at least some of the people running for office in 2016 expect questions about the way the police do their work and how the country responds when something goes wrong. But for a group of activists who first organized loosely online under the hashtag #blacklivesmatter in the hours after a jury acquitted George Zimmerman on all charges in the death of unarmed, black teen, Trayvon Martin, just getting someone in the 2016 field -- especially the heavy favorite to be the Democratic nominee -- to acknowledge that black lives are in particular peril is pretty huge.

I'm to the point where I don't see much difference between presidential politics and the dynamic of the high school lunch period. Whichever group of kids has gained control of the rules corners you and demands that you demonstrate your social acumen. Do you use the right expressions? Dress the right way? Express your appreciation for the right music? Wear your hair correctly? If you pass all the tests, well, you may not get their acceptance but at least they'll spare you whatever crap you would have had to otherwise endure on this particular day. What's the difference between that and this constant exercise of putting presidential candidates on the spot and testing them to see if they parrot the hashtag of the moment acceptably? Martin O'Malley says it wrong and gets booed off the stage by the Nutroots. Hillary's social media staff, having seen what happened to O'Malley, has the discipline to type the phrase in standalone fashion on Facebook - and the Washington Post actually reports on this triumph as if it were the submission of a balanced budget. Where I go back and forth is on the question of whether the country is dumb because it's fed this crap by the media, or whether we get the dumb media we deserve because dumb people lap it up. All I know is this: If this woman somehow makes it to the White House so she can shriek at us from the Oval Office while her husband actually runs the country, we will have proven as a nation that we're beyond redemption. Especially if stuff like this seriously helps her to get there.