A few weeks back, the Washington Examiner let its right-wing boosterism show with the front-page headline "Obama disses white guys." Now, the Examiner has placed on the print edition of Hugh Hewitt's May 17 column the headline “Public employee unions: Enemies of the state”:

Somebody at the Examiner, however, appears to have had second thoughts about it; the online version of Hewitt's column now contains the dull (if more factually accurate) headline “Tide of PR battle turns against public employee unions.” But the ghost of the original “enemies of the state” headline remains in the article's URL.

The thing is, Hewitt's column is nowhere near as provocative as the inflammatory headline the Examiner originally put on it. Sure, he calls public employee unions “bullies” who are putting their states in “peril,” but at no point does he call them “enemies of the state.”

It seems that someone at the Examiner has aspirations to be the New York Post. While both papers have been kept alive by the benevolence of billionaires, the resemblance stops there. The stabs at provocative headlines by Philip Anschutz's money pit are too ideologically driven to be effective; you have to get up pretty early to beat "Headless Body in Topless Bar."