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Deb Howell greets Washington Post readers who want more content in the paper with four small words this Sunday morning:

Get over it. Please.

Wow, way to ombuds there, Deb. Don’t hurt yourself advocating for the reader or anything. But you make it pretty clear that’s not whose side you’re on very quickly in today’s column, right Deb?

As newspapers grapple with declining circulation and advertising, journalists and business executives are scrambling to give readers a good newspaper in print and online. Even the smartest folks in the news business don’t know how the newspaper’s traditional economic model is going to support a robust news-gathering operation.

All those smartest people scrambling and grappling robustly is enough to give a gentleman the vapors! Lordy, Miss Howell, I love it when you talk dirty. Especially in defense of your Owners. All those gritty Grahams and Weymouths sweat and grunt as they try to understand the pixel side of the news business. Thank goodness they have you to lead the way!

The ink rubbing off on my hands isn’t a bother. I love unfurling Page 1 and leafing through pages for surprises and stories that I didn’t know I wanted to read.

Here’s some stories I didn’t know I wanted to read: the one about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage by Pulitzer-winning reporter Robin Givhan. The innuendo-laced story by the now-absent (and unmissed) John Solomon about John Edwards’ perfectly transparent Georgetown house sale. The stories all over the media about where Hillary was when the blue dress got stained. The story about John McCain’s barbeque at his family’s "cabin" in the Sonora desert — and all the gazillion identical stories scattered throughout major media the very same day.

Are those the stories you didn’t know you wanted to read, Deb?  

The ink rubbing off on my hands isn’t a bother, Miss Howell (well, actually, it is and always has been). What’s a bother is the taint of closeness to Village narrative. What’s a bother is your fawning adoration for WaPo0nline blog-like appendages like "The Trail" and "The Fact-Checker" that have begun to appear in the paper, and also online, which only serve to reinforce the narrative. What’s a bother is that only half as many facts about John McCain have been "checked" as those about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

There are, of course, some teehee moments from Deb that illustrate her steampunk approach to that wacky internet. First of all, she’s got a funny understanding of server chow and how hungry the little hamsters in their wheels can become:

Readers miss the daily congressional calendar, congressional votes and the list of Supreme Court hearings. But they’re all on washingtonpost.com. You didn’t get that late sports score you wanted? It’s online.

Cyberspace is free and instant and has no space limits.

Did you know those online-only writers at WaPo0 worked for free? Betcha Dan Froomkin didn’t either. And did you know the webmaster who moderates Paul Lukasiak’s comments out of existence works for free? And that it’s all instant?

Fundamentally missing the point about how those of us who hardly ever pick up a newspaper get our news, Deb also presents this screamer for your twenty-first century enjoyment:

And who wants to sit in an easy chair at night with the fire going and read the news off a computer?

Miss Howell, Miss Howell, pick me, oooooh, pick me!

"With three dogs, watching the Lakers play on teevee?"  (Of course, anyone who sits in an easy chair at night and reads the Washington Post is reading twenty-four-hour-old news.  Does that matter to Deb?)

But, at the end of her column, Deb decides she wants to encourage those oldsters who don’t like her answer "find it online and stop bothering me!"

Readers who aren’t online often feel cheated or left behind. Usually, they are older people afraid that they can’t learn to use computers. To those readers: You can do it! Readers in their 80s and even 90s e-mail me all the time.

Aww, isn’t that sweet and condescending? Kind of the ombuds version of "Got off my lawn!"

 In that vein, I have this to say, Miss Howell, about your two-year ombudsing contract: You are in your fifth overdrawn month. You have strayed far afield of the dead-tree paper that is your sole bailiwick, by writing about the dot-com part of the business — even though we readers are brushed off when we write to you about the dot-com output. Finally, you are telling senior citizens to spend their precious tax rebate checks on new computers.

Won’t you just please leave?  Thurston wants his laptop back.

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