This is several days late -- eons by blogospheric standards -- but quite a few posts are going to be because there are things I want to write about, but was unable to due to evil-flu-bug. Some things will get lost by the wayside, but this was one I didn't want to miss.

I was finally able to sit in front of my study computer this evening and take in last week's "Fox News Watch" -- sitting up for more than a half-hour is an accomplishment at this point.

One of their featured discussions was WashingtonPost.com's William Arkin's vile, hateful slander of the troops. (Check out posts here, here and here for background.) Even reliable liberal Neal Gabler conceded that Arkin's comments were out of bounds, but [there's always a but] Gabler complained: A. that conservatives were cherry-picking Arkin's comments and, B. that Arkin wasn't representative of the liberal left.

This was an interesting argument, considering how cavalier the mainstream media is in tarring the entire conservative movement with anything Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh says. As for cherry-picking Arkin -- well, he works for the Washington Post Company. That will get you greater scrutiny than if you work for the Santa Barbara News-Press, for instance. [An aside: Anyone with a couple tens of millions of dollars can start a new newspaper for Santa Barbara pretty easily and put the News-Press out of business in just a year or two.]

But Gabler's comments weren't the most interesting ones made over the weekend, for that we have the Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell's column.

First, there's this issue that the Post likes to make a big deal of:

The fact that The Post and washingtonpost.com are interlocking yet separate is lost on most readers, who do not care that the two are miles apart physically and under different management.

This is what we call a distinction without a difference. The fact that the .com has a different management chart than the dead tree is irrelevant to readers -- as it should be. If they really wanted the two units to be as separate as they claim in the public's mind, then they would name the .com something very different, say "CapitalCityNews.com," and they wouldn't put all of those articles that appear in the dead tree edition -- like Howell's column -- on the .com's site. Of course, if the .com was really as separate as Howell likes to make it, then the company couldn't leverage the good name of the dead tree Post to sell advertising on the .com.

The argument stinks and it doesn't do a whole lot of good for the Post's image (both dead tree and .com), let alone journalism as a whole. Imagine how journalists would laugh 'til they cried if the head of Halliburton tried to minimize wrongdoing by subsidiary KBR by saying that they're "miles apart physically and under different management."

Howell even appears to concede this point at the column's end when she writes: "And it is good editing that should prevail when a report carries The Post's banner." There's no distinction there between the .com and the dead tree.

Howell also helpfully gives us a new quote from Arkin that should run at the top of his blog from now on.

Arkin is unrepentant about two things: He works for The Post. Period. And he said he is "probably one of the best-known and respected anti-military military bloggers."

Maybe the Post (.com or dead tree) should consider hiring a pro-military military blogger sometime soon -- you know, seeing as how the United States is in the middle of a war right now.