You spoke earlier about 2014 being a breakthrough year, and you ended the year with executive actions on Cuba and immigration and climate change. But you didn’t make much progress this year on your legislative agenda. And some Republican lawmakers have said they’re less inclined to work with you if you pursue executive actions so aggressively. Are you going to continue to pursue executive actions if that creates more roadblocks for your legislative agenda? Or have you concluded that it’s not possible to break the fever in Washington and the partisan gridlock here?

Whoa. Unilateral action on Cuba, immigration, and climate change – and the attendant controversy – all in one question. The AP’s Julie Pace asked about the administration’s new posture towards Cuba, as did Lesley Clark from McClatchy. So when Kurtz wrote that you “would have no idea” that these things happened, what he meant is that they were all brought up during questioning, sometimes repeatedly.

But I didn’t even have to mention this because Kurtz acknowledged as much later in the same column, utterly defeating the point he thought he was making: “The AP’s Julie Pace at least asked the president to respond to dissidents who say his recognition of Cuba would give the Castro regime unwarranted benefits. McClatchy’s Lesley Clark also raised Cuba, but she asked about a five-part question—never a good idea—prompting Obama to cut her off and discourse at length.”

Moving on, Kurtz tried to explain what the lady reporters should have done to make their questions better:

I’m not saying the press has to be prosecutorial toward the president. But a full-dress news conference is a rare chance to ask aggressive questions that are honed to knock the commander-in-chief off his talking points. A correspondent can even do something as basic as quoting a Republican critic and asking the president to respond. But there was none of that.

There aren’t many questions a reporter can ask that are worse than “[Republican] says [X], what is your response?” If the goal, as Kurtz explained it, is to knock the president off his talking points, you’re not going to do that by inviting him to respond to someone else’s talking points. The president will say he disagrees, then he’ll launch into his own talking points. It’s an invitation for the president to say something uninteresting.

But this is what Howard Kurtz thinks a reporter should do. This is Howard Kurtz taking it upon himself to explain “basic” reporting to women who’ve been doing the job for years, clueing them in to trade secrets like “quote Republicans.” Good job, Howard. Thanks for saving journalism.