Philly.com's Christine Flowers

When Christine Flowers isn't playing contrary to logic on Philadelphia's local incarnation of the McLaughlin Group, she's keeping the lights on in the Inquirer's new headquarters by spreading condescending visceral across the virtual pages of Philly.com.

I like smart conservatives. They understand what they believe and why and they respect those who differ. Like intelligent liberals, they know that for a democracy to succeed, a broad range of beliefs need to exist to balance our extremes. I also like stupid conservatives. Like stupid liberals, they're too uninformed to really understand their beliefs, beliefs that are often malleable. Sarah Palin actually seems like a really nice person.

I even find crazy conservatives entertaining. Michele Bachmann and Ted Cruz - despite the billions they cost the country - are hilarious. They keep SNL on the air.

Christine Flowers is none of these things. She's a low budget Anne Counter. A muckraker. She's simply a contrarian. It's not hard to imagine Christine Flowers reporting out of Little Rock with the exact opposite agenda simply because people are more likely to ignore articles that blow smoke up their asses. 

She routinely cites her religious conviction as the foundation for her personal beliefs, as if anyone wants to know where a journalist goes to church. The reason we care about the foundational beliefs of our leaders is because they make our laws. Flowers is a reporter, not a politician, yet she arrogantly assumes her audience is more interested in her own beliefs than those of her subjects.

Even the most opinionated editorials maintain focus, but Flowers is primarily interested in telling us about herself.

Recently she interviewed Rep. Brian Sims, the state's first openly gay Congressman who's grabbed national attention by challenging just about everything that's wrong with politics.

The headline of her article grants Sims a pass as a liberal rival while the article reeks of self promotion and condescension, as if she is somehow Pennsylvania's political litmus test.

Instead of simply reporting on her interview with Sims, she seems to believe that she is allowing him to do his job, that her approval is needed.

She seems to think that momentarily pausing her xenophobic rhetoric is a humanitarian effort, but in doing so only makes her prejudice more obvious.

She might as well say, "I like Brian, he's gay but he doesn't really act gay."

I'm not painting an extreme, and Flowers' bigotry isn't just documented in the gay community. This is the journalist who called America's first Indian-American Miss America, Nina Davuluri, a "Miss Special Interest Group," callously referring to Davuluri's notion of the American Pie as the "Indian-American Samosa."

She even went as far as comparing her own Italian-American heritage to Davuluri's, as if a white woman named Flowers is being routinely stopped by the TSA.

Flowers concluded her article on Davuluri by criticizing Miss America's inspirational comments to minority children. Then Flowers expressed contempt for bigots, thus attempting to absolve herself of any accountability stating, "a plague on both your houses."

If you're going to judge people who comment on their own ethnicity or sexual orientation, stand by your judgments.

She ended her article on her interview with Sims somewhat more amicably, offering him an unsolicited and irrelevant endorsement, "Sims...gained many admirers, including yours truly."

Perhaps there's hope that someone so enamored with Sims' empathetic outlook may find a bit of her own.