I'm willing to believe that the skids could be greased for a some papers, based on the trendiness of the topic or the authors' reputations. I'm also willing to believe that this is hard for people without the relevant expertise to detect.
However, I think describing peer review, generally, as "a blanket pass" is going much too far. If anything, I wish it were harder on actual methodological errors while being much, much more permissive of (openly-disclosed) ambiguities in the data or gaps in the theories. Right now, people tend to 'write around' issues in their data, lest a reviewer argue that this invalidates the entire experiment. Looking at papers from the 1980s and 1990s, it's amazing to me how much more frank the authors were.
Sorry! I'm not trying to, but I'm also not sure how else to interpret them. As I said, I'm willing to believe that papers occasionally slip through the cracks (the arsenic life thing from 2011 could have been caught in review, for example), but the idea that a decent number of papers papers just slide through the peer review process is totally unlike the experience I've had with my own and my friends' and colleagues' papers.
However, I think describing peer review, generally, as "a blanket pass" is going much too far. If anything, I wish it were harder on actual methodological errors while being much, much more permissive of (openly-disclosed) ambiguities in the data or gaps in the theories. Right now, people tend to 'write around' issues in their data, lest a reviewer argue that this invalidates the entire experiment. Looking at papers from the 1980s and 1990s, it's amazing to me how much more frank the authors were.