As I've previously noted, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz often seems completely uninterested in answering the questions he takes during his weekly Q&A sessions -- either that or incapable of understanding them. Here's this week's example:

New York, N.Y.: The Post shouldn't have run Sarah Palin's op-ed piece on global warming. I know your going to knee-jerk and say it's only because I don't like Palin, but that has nothing to do with it. Global warming is a highly technical topic that Palin simply knows nothing about. For the same reason, the Post shouldn't publish an op-ed by Joe Biden on quantum mechanics. I have a radical suggestion: the Post should only publish pieces by people who understand the subject matter.

Howard Kurtz: If it were up to me, the paper (and others) wouldn't publish pieces by politicians that are ghostwritten by their staffs (on both sides of the aisle). It's not like these pols have no other way of getting their message out. But if you run such op-eds - including one by Barack Obama, as I recall - you can't impose a different standard on Sarah Palin.

See how Kurtz's entire response was a defense of the Post's decision to run Palin's op-ed despite the fact that a Palin staffer wrote it for her? Ok, now look back at the question: it didn't have anything to do with the fact that the op-ed was ghost-written. Nothing! Didn't even mention that a Palin staffer wrote the op-ed!

No, the questioner pointed out that Sarah Palin doesn't know anything about global warming, so her views on the subject were unworthy of space on the Post's op-ed page. But it's harder to defend the Post from that complaint, so Kurtz just went ahead and invented a different one to respond to.

Later in the chat, Kurtz actually wrote this:

lots of reporters, commentators and advocates -- including Al Gore, in an interview with Andrea Mitchell -- have ripped apart Palin's op-ed. So in that sense it contributed to the climate change debate.

Wow. Talk about transparently carrying water for your employer. Kurtz is really praising the op-ed for contributing to the debate because it contained a bunch of falsehoods other people had to respond to?

Speaking of which, when is the Post going to get around to running a response to Palin?