Columnist David Broder, who held top reporting positions and then an opinion slot at the Washington Post for so long that he'd been called "dean of the Washington press corps" for 50 years, died at 81 today of complications from diabetes.

This is the worst David Broder column ever written, and it is also identical to all other David Broder columns. That is the Broder Paradox! I will reprint it for you, after the jump.

Today in America's Worst Opinion Section: lots of important thoughts about The Tea Parties, from confused old people who have been regurgitating blinkered DC consensus garbage for almost 200 years between them.

David Broder, who's been rehashing conventional wisdom at the Washington Post for nearly 500 years (or like 20), just accepted a buy-out. He'll still contribute to the paper as contract employee, though. We wouldn't want David Ignatius to get lonely! Still no word on whether executive editor Len Downie's taking a buyout too. Many people hope he will, as it'd give the paper a chance to shake things up. And a new editor might help solve the war between the paper and Post online. [Politico]

Yesterday on the Politico website, Andrew Glass posed a query about Washington Post columnist David Broder, who is known as "the dean of the Washington press corps" because his early columns about how he could see good arguments on both the Loyalist and Whig sides during the revolution set the template for evenhanded analysis that exists to this day. Glass' question is, in fact, related to that evanhandedness. Why, if Broder is so "relentlessly centrist," do so many people hate his fucking guts and vomit blood every time they read his meandering advocacy of the status quo?

David Broder—known as "the dean of the Washington press corps" because he taught a young H.L. Mencken how to read—offers his thoughts on the Imus affair and the Duke lacrosse incident today. Broder's columns usually read like a parody of, well, Broder columns, but this morning's missive is almost a parody of a parody of a Broder column.