This is what the Washington Post considers front-page news

Here's how the worst article you'll read all week begins:

The coffee was still brewing when Chris Ann Cleland got her first reminder of the day that voting for Barack Obama might have been a mistake.

The Prince William County real estate agent was sitting at a long wooden table covered with paperwork. Her clients, a young couple who had brought their 2-week-old baby, were finalizing a short sale on a townhouse that they were anxious to unload, even if it meant ruining their credit, because they had maxed out their credit cards trying to make the payments.

For Cleland, it was another example -- one of many this day -- of the broken promises of a president who she thought would be different.

Got that?  The housing collapse is Barack Obama's fault.  Never mind that it was well underway long before John Roberts screwed up Obama's oath of office -- something the Washington Post doesn't bother to mention.

A few paragraphs later, the Post acknowledges that Cleland's story may not be representative of ... well, anything at all:

There is no empirical evidence at this point in Virginia's race for governor showing that huge numbers of voters think like Cleland and will respond by sending a message to Washington.

Then the Post went right back to recounting up Cleland's complaints, and those of a fellow Obama critic.  Paragraph after paragraph devoted to nothing more than typing up two peoples' anecdotal views -- views the Post acknowledges may not be representative of anything, and views the Post does nothing to put in context.  Complaints like the fact that, due to economic struggles, some of the residents in her "upper-middle-class enclave" don't want to pay to keep the "crape myrtles and azaleas" in cul-de-sac circles from browning and withering.  No, seriously: The Post offers that as an example of Cleland's "disappointment with Obama."

It goes on like that for 1,400 words -- it's essentially an op-ed by a disgruntled Obama voter, dressed up like a news article.  The byline reads "By Sandhya Somashekhar," but it should say "By Chris Ann Cleland, as told to Sandhya Somashekhar."

That's not totally fair.  Somashekhar did go to the trouble of quoting a Republican strategist saying Democrats are in trouble in Virginia (no Democratic strategist was quoted.)

Oh, did I mention that this article ran on the front page of the Washington Post?