William McGurn, head speechwriter for most of President George W. Bush’s administration, takes to the WSJ today to discuss what a failure former junior speechwriter Matt Latimer was at his job. Oh, it truly pains McGurn to write this about a young man he hired — indeed, he “would have taken them to the grave” — but Latimer is now peddling a book about what buffoons his former employers were and McGurn could not in good conscience let it go by without fighting fire with fire.
While I could understand, say, The Daily Beast or Huffington Post going with this, it strikes me as rather lowbrow for a prestige outlet like WSJ. An op-ed by McGurn defending the administration from Latimer’s charges, sure, but a frontal assault on a junior staffer? That just seems petty.
