Joe Klein in Time:
Given the heinous dust that’s been raised, it seems likely that end-of-life counseling will be dropped from the health-reform legislation. But that’s a small point, compared with the larger issue that has clouded this summer: How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark? (See pictures of angry health-care protesters.)
I’m not going to try. I’ve written countless “Democrats in Disarray” stories over the years and been critical of the left on numerous issues in the past. This year, the liberal insistence on a marginally relevant public option has been a tactical mistake that has enabled the right’s “government takeover” disinformation jihad. There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees’ unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don’t retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.
Doug J., with a nice Big Lebowski reference in his blog title:
Klein has made a career out of concern-trolling Democrats, praising “conservative intellectuals”, sucking up to Hugh Hewitt, and getting a boner every time The Decider gave him a new nickname. In other words, he’s a fairly typical modern day “liberal” pundit.
So, in some sense, he deserves credit for saying the obvious: that whatever flaws the Democrats have, the Republicans are completely worthless and any comparison between the two is essentially ludicrious, that say what you will about the tenets of the Democratic party, dude, at least it’s an ethos.
In another sense, it’s silly to think of Klein or others of his ilk as free-standing objects rather than as cogs in a big conventional wisdom machine. And that’s why I’m happy to see this column. Perhaps it marks the beginning of willingness of the media to speak honestly about what the Republican party has become.
Athenae at First Draft:
Who are these America-hating Democrats, Joey? Can you give me some names? If there are “more than a few,” it shouldn’t be hard. Who are the Democrats who are so enslaved to the horrible idea of civil liberties (gasp, pearlclutch, faint) that they would make the Baby Jesus cry like that? Who’s in the pocket of the teachers’ unions (those terrible people) and who’s a complete and total pacifist who thinks we should melt down every tank in existence to make swingsets for bin Laden’s kids?
I want names put to these slurs because otherwise it’s just the usual lame-ass “I’m praising Democrats, but not the pussies or anything, lest you think I am a pussy by extension” trick he and his always play in order to appear “independent.” As if it’s independent to say one nasty thing and one nice thing. As if that makes any kind of sense.
Aimai (I.F. Stone’s granddaughter) links to Athenae and has a tale to tell:
Last week I went to a cookout on the beach here with some old friends (Sausages and seafood, but no cocktail weenies!) Every year they do a cookout, and then a birthday party, and for years I’ve known that one of their guests was Joe Klein. I never mixed it up with him because, after all, well…the opportunity never presented itself and while I’m pretty aggressive in print no one really goes up to someone and picks a quarrel with them, do they?
Or maybe they do. Yes, I guess they do. I was standing at the cookout minding my own business when Klein started pontificating for the rubes on how “surprising” and “shocking” it was that Grassley, of all people, should have come out and endorsed the “death panels” lie. I walked up and said “why are you surprised?” [edited to remove typo] to which he, in best pundit debater fashion (never allow yourself to admit you were just posing!), shot back “who says I’m surprised?” I said “well, you did. You just started your lecture saying “Its surprising.”” Its not surprising, the republicans have nothing left to lose and nothing left to gain at this point outside of pleasing the crazy base and attacking Obama and the dems.”
We were off and running. He then said that its true the fringe republicans were “crazy” but perhaps no crazier than the “crazy left” under Bush. I thought he meant the “truthers” so I said “name me one person in congress or the Senate who was as crazy on any topic as these Republican senators and Congressmen who sign on to the birther and deather stuff are now?” Evading this question he said “well, Glenn Greenwald is crazy—he’s a civil liberties absolutist.” Now, me, I come from a long line of civil liberties absolutists so I said “I admire Glenn Greenwald’s work immensley but it must be very embarrassing for you, of course, because he’s been eating your lunch for years.” (!) I think this must be something of a sore point for him. He began shrieking “Glenn Greenwald is EVIL! EVILl!..do you know what he did? He “sicced” his blog readers on my EDITOR and she was going through a DIVORCE at the time.” Really? I said, politely, that was very wrong, if it happened.
“We kept it very quiet” he said, backing off the claim of any real harm and, as a twofer, managing to imply that only those “in the know” had been kept informed.People around us were clamoring to know what the debate was about so I laid it out, chapter and verse: I explained the Klein was upset because he had been caught out shilling for the Republicans on National Security Matters and on the FISA court legislation in particular and that he was still upset because he’d been held up for ridicule for his absurd statement that there was no problem with the secret Bush programs although he didn’t know anything about them. And that this extended to the actual retroactive FISA legislation, which he also said was fine but didn’t know anything about. This seemed to inflame things somewhat. Can’t see why. He began shrieking at me that he hadn’t been wrong, he’d been misled by a “democratic staffer” but really, I just began laughing at that point because “I didn’t read the legislation” like “the dog ate my homework” is rather a lame explanation for a grown man, let alone a self described journalist.
I re-iterated that I was a big admirer of Glenn’s work and that he had just received the I.F. Stone award for his excellence. That really got Klein’s goat and he started screaming that he had been one of Izzy’s readers for years and that Glenn was no Izzy, that he was crazily anti-national security which Izzy wouldn’t have been, and at any rate I shouldn’t talk about things I don’t understand and I should realize that Klein has been on the right side of every argument since the Vietnam war. Yes! I should read his stuff on the Vietnam war!”
I said that I was, in fact, one of his readers—that I read his column and his blog and that it was precisely because I did know his history, in detail, that I accepted Glenn’s critique of him, which of course has always been extensively documented and linked. And then, in what might be the piece de resistance of this little interaction, he screamed “you don’t read me! You read WIKIPEDIA! AND THAT’S LEFTIST.” He then added that he had always been anti war and that I should “read his [Klein's] stuff from 1993.” Hmm….1993, were we at war with Iraq then? I rather thought that was a different time, and even a different president. I take it that the rationale behind that bizarre interjection is that, as far as Klein is concerned, most of this is really old history at this point and what he really wants to be talking about is health care reform.
After this the e discussion, such as it was, devolved into the usual journalistic posturing and ranting against “those bloggers” who “don’t do research” and who “don’t have editors.” (There were many other well respected journalists at this dinner but they don’t deserve to be dragged in here) to which I responded “jeezus christ on toast points you can say that to me after it came out today that John Solomon, then of the Washington Post, was writing fawning letters to the White House explaining to them how he could spin the US attorney scandal anyway they wanted? And hellooooo? Judy Miller?” Klein actually backed down on this topic and we agreed that McClatchey had done very good reporting but the main thing I took away from the discussion is that for journalists like Klein the world is divided into practitioners/insiders and totally ignorant outsiders. He was surprised that I brought up the Solomon story, or that I took seriously the Judy Miller issue, because in his world that’s really inside baseball. In fact when I pointed out how abysmal the Washington Post’s editorial page had been, under Fred Hiatt’s tenure, he and another Journalist standing nearby assured me that Fred is an “editorialist” so the ordinary rules don’t apply and I don’t need to tar the whole paper with his sins. Its as thought they imagine that each story is a stand alone piece and that there’s a hard and fast line between opinion and “fact” when every day, and every way, we’ve seen any pretense to that distinction run right into the ground. Has any adult person thought that since Media Whores Online (of sainted memory?).
It’s so wonderful I can’t adequately describe it. I particularly like the part where Klein screams hysterically that Greenwald is a “civil liberties absolutist!” It’s just too good.
Aimai is my hero — actually has been for a long time, but this seals it.
Big Tent Democrat at Talk Left
Glenn Greenwald combines this and another story.
Time‘s Joe Klein was at a beach party last weekend and was confronted about his recent, vague statement that “there are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection.” The person doing the confronting was Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog — who also happens to be the granddaughter of I.F. Stone (which ends up being relevant to the confrontation) — and she masterfully recounts the revealing and hilarious Klein outburst that ensued, during which, among other things, he accused me of being “evil,” a “crazy civil liberties absolutist” and “crazily anti-national security.”
Much of this is just standard Klein. He’s been “accusing” me for years of being what he calls a “civil liberties extremist” or “monomaniacal on the subject of civil liberties” — as though that’s some type of insult, when I view it as being exactly the opposite. For reasons I recently explained — in response to to Michael Massing’s Chuck-Todd-echoing accusation in The New York Review of Books that I fail to take into account ”practical considerations” when advocating various views — it’s impossible to believe in constitutional principles and the rule of law without being “extremist” and even ”absolute” because that is the nature of those guarantees.
[...]
Speaking of Chuck Todd and his “30,000 feet” mentality, the superb journalist Jeremy Scahill was on Bill Maher’s HBO show on Friday night — along with Todd, Jay Leno, and Rep. Jan Schakoswky — to talk about Blackwater (about which Scahill wrote the definitive book), but Scahill used the opportunity to take Todd to task for, among other things, the comments he made in his interview with me dismissing criminal investigations as pie-in-the-sky Leftist naïveté .
[...]
Todd’s condescending responses illustrate the same point as the above episodes with Klein and Ambinder: in the eyes of Beltway mavens, those who warned about and worked against the radicalism and lawbreaking of the Bush administration are the fringe, crazed, out-of-touch radicals. While Todd was fiddling around with pretty colored maps and fun polling games, Scahill was courageously investigating one of the most corrupt, dangerous and lethal private corporations in the world, yet it’s Todd who understands and must solemnly explain the hardened realities of politics to Scahill, the confused and silly Leftist.
[...]
According to Scahill (via email), Todd approached him after the Maher show and the following occurred:
“Right as we walked off stage, he said to me “that was a cheap shot.” I said “what are you talking about?” and he said “you know it.” I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: ”that’s not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV.”"
Media stars are so unaccustomed to being held accountable for the impact of their behavior — especially when they’re on television — that they consider it a grievous assault on their entitlement when it happens.
Sahil Kapur at HuffPo:
Scahill singled out Todd, a fellow panelist on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher”, for not taking the issue more seriously. “Chuck, you called it political cat-nip to talk about the CIA and Cheney’s role in this, because it distracts from the important issues,” he said. “This is a central issue and you called it cable cat-nip.”
Todd responded by alleging that even if journalists reported more vigorously on the issue, it was unlikely that the organization would ever be held accountable. He said it would turn into “a political food fight” where “Congress would not be able to get any prosecutions done,” suggesting that Blackwater would inevitably find a way to get off the hook.
I think you might be the wrong business, Chuck. Telling everyone who confronts you that they’re taking a “cheap shot” – which you’ve said to me on several occasions in our email exchanges – is getting tired.
Perhaps you should take what people are accusing you of doing, or not doing, a little more reflectively. It might make you a good journalist some day. We all had such high hopes for you. What the hell happened? That, was a cheap shot.
UPDATE: Joe Klein responds:
Twice in the past month, my private communications have been splashed about the internet. That such a thing would happen is unfortunate, and dishonorable, but sadly inevitable, I suppose. I ignored the first case, in which a rather pathetic woman acolyte of Greenwald’s published a hyperbolic account of a conversation I had with her at a beach picnic on Cape Cod. Now, Greenwald himself has published private emails of mine that were part of a conversation taking place on a list-serve. In one of those emails, I say that Greenwald “cares not a whit for America’s national security.”
I’d like to quote here from a subsequent email on that thread, which Greenwald hasn’t published, in which I explain why I have such strong feelings about Greenwald:
“For the past several years, Greenwald has conducted a persistent, malicious campaign to distort who I am and where I stand. He is a mean-spirited, graceless bully. During that time, I have never seen him write a positive sentence about the US military, which has transformed itself dramatically for the better since Rumsfeld’s departure (indeed, he ridiculed me when I reported that the situation in Anbar Province was turning around in 2007). I have never seen him acknowledge that the work of the clandestine service—performed disgracefully by the CIA during the early Bush years—is an absolute necessity in a world where terrorists have the capability to attack us at any time, in almost any place. Nor have I seen [him] acknowledge that such a threat exists, nor make a single positive suggestion about how to confront that threat in ways that might conform to his views. Therefore, I have seen no evidence that he cares one whit about the national security of the United States. It is not hyperbole, it is a fact.”
I am not a religious reader of Greenwald–he does go on, and on–and it’s possible that I missed extensive posts in which he praises the Armed Forces or makes positive suggestions about how to track possible communications between terrorists abroad and their confederates here. But I sort of doubt that. What I have seen from him, ad nauseum, are intemperate attacks in which he questions the character of–no, it’s worse than that: he slimes–anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him.
I agree with Greenwald on some things, and appreciate his insights on others. But he is a thoroughly dishonorable person–as he proved by releasing my private emails–and, when it comes to his oft-trumpeted belief in the right to privacy, a stone hypocrite as well.
UPDATE #2: John Cole
UPDATE #3: Glenn Greenwald responds to Klein. Aimai responds to Klein
Michael Calderone at Politico
UPDATE #4: Jason Linkins at Huffington
