The Washington Post's opinion pages aren't getting better.

They may be getting worse.

A few months ago, Jeff Bezos announced that he intended to change the nature of his paper’s opinion pages. From now, he said, these pages would focus on advocating for "personal liberties and free markets" and would exclude opposing viewpoints.

I read the Post’s op-eds every day and have yet to detect much change. Ruth Marcus no longer writes columns or editorials. She resigned in protest as did Jennifer Rubin.

But Marcus was probably the most intelligent of the Post’s stable of liberal writers and Rubin’s hatchet jobs rarely made the print edition.

Instead of Rubin’s occasional pieces, the Post serves up columns by Monica Hesse, a left-wing feminist promoted from the paper’s woke Style section. The only personal liberty I’ve seen her advocate for is virtually unlimited access to abortions.

And instead of Marcus, the Post gives us a steady diet of Matt Bai, who considers himself a liberal and whose columns confirm that self-assessment. To me, that’s a step in the wrong direction.

Consider this column in which Bai praises Bruce Springsteen for saying, “My home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.” (Emphasis added)

Springsteen made this pronouncement when he opened his show in Manchester, England. He placed it at the beginning of his latest album — a decision Bai lauds.

The Trump administration is many things, some of them bad, but it’s not treasonous. The left’s efforts to prove otherwise through the Russia-collaboration story, to which the Post contribute mightily, came up empty.

For Springsteen to tell his fans that Trump is a traitor could incite the fringiest of them to try to kill the president, who has already been the target of two assassination attempts.

Springsteen is a singer. I’ve come to expect reckless demagoguery for his ilk.

Bai is a columnist for the Washington Post. If he’s going to endorse Springsteen’s slander, he should provide evidence.

He didn’t. There is none.

It would be hard for Bai’s column to go downhill from his Springsteen-gushing, but he gives it a good try with this potted history of post-9/11 America:

Looking back now, with a bit of the dispassion that historians will someday bring to the early 21st century, we should recognize that [the 9/11] attacks fundamentally destabilized our country. This is painful to admit, because it means that a handful of violent Islamists managed to achieve their goal — all because we let them. But it is an inescapable truth.

The first direct consequence was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which ended up shattering America’s trust in intelligence agencies, military leaders and news outlets. The second direct consequence was the banking catastrophe of 2008, which almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if a government searching for a quick economic rebound hadn’t encouraged a period of negligent lending. That second cataclysm destroyed what faith Americans still had in their financial system. . . .

There was a moment, just after the financial fiasco, when Americans opted for a hopeful kind of reinvention. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 felt as though it might signify a washing away of the past — generationally, socially, politically. Historians can debate why that didn’t happen; my own sense is that Obama’s administration, faced with reactionary resistance and lacking any specific reform plan, fell back on defending an activist government Americans no longer trusted.

Almost every bit of this “dispassionate” statement of “inescapable truths” is wrong. For example, the banking crisis of 2008 was not the result of the government searching for a quick economic rebound following 9/11. It was the result of lending practices demanded by the left — including community activist Barack Obama — because it wanted blacks to own homes they couldn’t really afford. Banks were on board because they thought they could profit.

The roots of the crisis date back to the Clinton administration and its partnership with Fannie Mae. This, of course, pre-dates 9/11.

The Bush administration reluctantly went along with the scam due to pushback from Democrats, notably Barney Frank, and fear of being accused of racism. The desire to spur economic growth after 9/11 was not a factor.

As I wrote here, based on the work of Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner:

In 1994, Bill Clinton proposed increasing home ownership through a “partnership” between government and the private sector, principally orchestrated by Fannie Mae. Lenders proceeded to promote reckless borrowing, knowing they could off­load risk to purchasers of bundled loans, and especially to Fannie. In 1994, subprime lending was $40 billion. In 1995, almost one in five mortgages was subprime. Four years later [note: well before 9/11] such lending totaled $160 billion.

The Bush administration warned as early as 2001 about the problems these lending policies were creating, and in 2003, through Secretary of Treasury John Snow, pushed for reforms to address the issue. But congressional Democrats, led by Barney Frank, blocked reform legislation.

Bai leaves reality even further behind when he attempts to cast Barack Obama as a victim forced by “reactionary resistance” to defend an activist government. Obama defended an activist government because he favored it, as all left-liberals do.

Bai doesn’t try to explain the basis for his very own, personal sense that “reactionary resistance” — I guess he means the Tea Party movement — is to blame for Obama defending an activist government. The “reactionary resistance” could not have stopped Obama from moving away from government activism, nor would it have wanted to.

Early in his presidency, Obama had bigger congressional majorities than any president in recent times. For a while, he had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. He used his majorities to achieve activist government ends, including Obamacare.

What the heck is Bai talking about? And what the heck was Bezos talking about when he promised to change the direction of the Post’s op-ed pages?

I didn’t favor the promised exclusion of viewpoints that don’t support personal liberties and free markets. But I hoped that the Post would exclude inane viewpoints that promote the view that the U.S. president is a traitor and present nonsensical claims about the origins of the 2008 banking crisis while blaming Obama’s big-government policies on conservatives.

It looks like that was too much to hope for.