I don’t agree with a lot of what Joe Klein is saying here but I think his central point is a good, important one:
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.
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.
Punchy
he’s a fairly typical modern day “liberal” pundit.
Liberal? Is this a joke? I dont that word means what you think it means.
JonathanW
You and Klein had me until this point:
There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts.
Mike Pence is about as far away from rhetorical honesty as you can get in the House.
DougJ
Liberal? Is this a joke?
Hence the quotes, my friend.
Punchy
And apparently I cannot type as well as I think I can type.
/scurries out of room
gypsy howell
He’s right about the right, of course. They are deep in to nihilist territory, and I’m glad he’s calling it out. I would take issue with his naive claim that if there were no public option, the right would find nothing to squawk about. They’d just move on to the next lie (and in fact, already have). Death panels, forced abortion, whatever.
PeakVT
How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists?
That’s the only sentence I liked.
Genericlawstudents
“Perhaps it marks the beginning of willingness of the media to speak honestly about what the Republican party has become.”
Somehow I see this prediction being remembered in a light similar to John’s “Peak Wingnut” theory…
Sentient Puddle
Unfortunately, I think the big CW machine has built-in redundancy to cover mechanical failures like Klein.
mistermix
I hope you’re right about the CW shifting, but this was hard to swallow:
Why not:
“The liberal insistence on end of life planning has been a tactical mistake that has enabled the right’s “smothering Granny with a pillow” disinformation jihad.”
Makes just as much sense.
SGEW
Why do I feel like every time Joe Klein writes something somewhat sensible, you [1] take it as a sign that the “media,” et. al., is finally coming around to a reasonable point of view?
The first time Klein started calling McCain’s lies “lies,” I thought that this might be right . . . but that was a year ago, and the “media” in toto is just as Broderized as it was then, if not more so.
[1] Or maybe I’m thinking of posts John wrote, I can’t remember.
low-tech cyclist
That’s the only sentence I liked.
But at least it got said by a Villager in good standing.
That’s pretty remarkable.
Face
That title’s a Big Lebowski ref, right?
Ah….you’re riffing off the “nihilists” reference in Joke Line’s screed. Got it. Finally.
me
DougJ
That title’s a Big Lebowski ref, right?
Yup.
NonyNony
@mistermix:
I hope you’re right about the CW shifting, but this was hard to swallow:
I agree. The public option is the only token in the whole plan that actually has a chance of keeping costs in check. It isn’t “marginally relevant” – without it and with the other provisions (notably the “mandatory insurance coverage” part) the whole thing becomes a boondoggle of epic proportions that will cause people to hate and resent the legislators who crafted it.
That’s why I can’t agree with your previous post, DougJ – there actually are some situations where no bill is better than “any bill”. If the “any bill” contains the requirement for us all to have insurance coverage but doesn’t include a mandate for a not-for-profit plan to keep costs in check then things will be worse than they are right now, no matter how many subsidies get thrown at individuals trying to buy coverage to keep themselves within the law.
(Can you imagine the proliferation of the health-care equivalents of “1-800-SAFE-AUTO” out there? How will that sort of crap keep costs in check? It won’t – and there’s a good chance it will make things worse instead of better.)
me
Great, an unclosed blockquote killed my post.
DougJ
@mistermix
I agree with you.
Chris Baldwin
“There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees’ unions.”
The benefit of the workers is the benefit of the nation. This should be obvious.
DougJ
Or maybe I’m thinking of posts John wrote, I can’t remember.
I think you are. Maybe I’m wrong.
Karl
Why do the DFHs have to use so many cuss words?
rock
“The benefit of the workers is the benefit of the nation”
Communist!
MattF
Klein has graduated into the “not so bad” category. But you can almost feel the dubious looks that the avatar of Conventional Wisdom is starting to cast in his direction. Pretty soon, he’ll be just another DFH.
lamh31
“Politicizing the terror alerts”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0809/Politicizing_the_terror_alerts.html?showall
…An abuse so gross — if Ridge is right — shows, among other things, what a powerful influence on the all-important tracking polls terror alerts must have had. And it suggests that Obama’s efforts to keep terror arrests out of the national news are good politics too.
Nutella
If that quote is representative of the whole article, then most of it is nasty cracks about “the left” and then a grudging acknowledgement that the left includes two honorable men.
The problem with Klein is that he’s 100% in the tank for the establishment but he has either a conscience or a need for approval that causes him to throw out a sentence now and then that’s not quite CW. Or maybe that’s in the job description for “liberal pundit”.
His claim that the left pushing that “marginally relevant” public option is responsible for the hysteria on the right is disgusting. Whatever your position on the public option may be, the very LAST thing it is is marginally relevant!
Mudge
They are the party of “No”, which translates into nihilism in practice. More than anything they are devoid of vision and ideas and fundamentally do not care about American society or the actual people in it. They exist, and act, only to defeat Obama and cannot recognize the underlying merit of any position. And they lie, hook, line and sinker. No party has done more for the disadvantaged or elderly or minorities than the Democratic Party..it is a tenet of their party..a fundamental principle, to improve the lives of Americans..yet the public buys all of the “kill your grandma” crap. Who invented Social Security and Medicare to avoid forcing children to have to kill their sick, elderly mothers (methaphorically, of course)..Democrats.
lamh31
Damn blockquote…
Dr.BDH
There are thousands of more honorable, smarter people who could do Joe Klein’s job better than he does. Before breakfast. In pajamas. What he believes has no bearing on the real world, he just writes whatever his gut tells him that day. That once in a while his gut and your gut agree doesn’t make him representative of anything. He’s a liar. A hack. Don’t listen to him.
Hunter Gathers
The CW will change when Dick’s Army decends on D.C. on September 12th. 15,000 crazy armed assholes will change perceptions rather quickly.
Cat Lady
Joe Klein dropped the right wing/DFH false equivalencies when he was subjected to a level of vitriol from the Commentary crowd that he never experienced from the DFHs. Ever since then he seems to have chosen sides, albeit he’s taking baby steps towards the light. He’s still afraid of the DFH’s under his bed, but they’re not as scary as the delusional out of power neocons.
BombIranForChrist
@Nutella: I agree with Nutella here. The “marginally relevant” quip is pure Klein. He just can’t resist sticking his finger in the eye of the dirty fucking hippies. I guess he didn’t get enough of that free love back in the day, and now it’s payback, baby! Yeah!
cbear
Reading Klein is akin to watching a low-ranking hyena lick the genitals of the Alpha leader while glancing nervously at the other powerful members of the pack.
Hunter Gathers
@cbear: Don’t compare Joe Klein to hyenas. It’s an insult to the hyena community.
lotus
Standing O for Henry Waxman, if you please.
— Marcy Wheeler.
HeeheeheeheeheeheeheeHENRY!
lotus
Needless to add, everything but the first and last lines of my 31 wanted to be inside the blockquote.
mutter mutter mutter
Zifnab
We’ve seen more and more rats fleeing the GOP ship. What could this portend?
That said… The moment the GOP stops teabagging itself and gets back to righting it’s ship of state, you can guarantee Joe Klein will be elbowing the line to get up and kiss tailbone.
We see “Republicans Return!” columns every six months or so. This is just the tough in the waves of political discourse. Klein isn’t really going anywhere.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@SGEW:
The media, like science, switches to a new paradigm one obituary at a time. Once people are imprinted with a zeitgeist, very few of them can shake it off without experiencing some sort of deep trauma (c.f. Pavlov’s dogs who lost their conditioning after being abandonded during a flood and nearly dying in their cages). The pundits, journalists and political operators of the 1980s and 1990s will never stop being creatures of that era, with very few exceptions. All we can do is wait for younger folks to replace them.
Stefan
There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare.
Bullshit. There have been times when Democrats have run factually accurate campaigns on issues like Republican plans to destroy Social Security and Medicare. It’s not demagogic to accurately characterize your opponent’s stated positions.
There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees’ unions.
Bullshit. Name me “more than a few”.
There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection.
Bullshit. Give me an example not out of “24”. Why, they might even out the names of undercover CIA agents! Oh, wait…is that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing?
There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances.
Bullshit. There are those who mistrust the use of military power under stupid circumstances, but “almost any”? Name me more than one prominent Democrat who believes this.
Stefan
There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts.
Ah, yes. Like the fact that Pence’s April 2007 visit to the Shorja market in Baghdad, where he wore a bulletproof vest and had attack helicopters and a company of soldiers protecting him, was “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.”
Which makes me wonder what the hell goes on in those Indiana markets in the summertime…..
Stan of the Sawgrass
Joe Klein– truth to out-of-power. Maybe, anyway.
Tony J
Perhaps it marks the beginning of willingness of the media to speak honestly about what the Republican party has become.
Did I miss another meeting?
Comrade Michael "Objectively Pro Situ" Brown
Or not.
“Media to speak honestly”?! Sheesh, Doug. Precisely what would be the percentage for the media in doing anything like that?
catclub
Who knew …
that Jean-Paul Sartre was a Republican?
tim
Yes, Klein only comes to his milquetoast slams on the Republicans AFTER a longish litany of alleged Democratic failings. What a douche.
Mike G
There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection.
Like destroying a CIA counter-nuclear-proliferation intelligence network out of political spite against an agent’s husband for exposing lying the country into war?
Either Klein was confused because Fox News was labelling Cheney and Libby as Democrats that day, or he is full of shit.
Kyle
There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances.
Maybe they could fit into a phone booth.
On 9/11 there was a Republican Vice President who ordered the Air Force grounded as hijacked planes plowed into national landmarks.
T. O'Hara
Is that why Armitage did that? I thought he was anti-war.
Comrade Michael "Objectively Pro Situ" Brown
Anyway, Taibbi already capped Joke Line and his ilk in their big slopey foreheads earlier today:
Kristol Meth
DougJ: Worthy fuckin’ adversary.
Mr Furious
Marginally relevant? Fuck you!
Perhaps Joe Klein (or Drum, Yglesias and Silver in Taibbi’s column) can explain to me how “robust reforms” like forcing insurance companies to accept everyone regardless of age, health or preexisting condition and not be able to drop anyone for those or any other reasons won’t immediately result in massive rate hikes for everyone.
Add to that a mandate for everyone to purchase insurance? How is that not a massive handout to the industry?
Without the public option to offer an alternative and to (attempt to) control costs, all of the above is horseshit, and a recipe for policy and political disaster.
bartkid
>So, in some sense, he deserves credit for saying the obvious:So, in some sense, he deserves credit for saying the obvious
In the sense of “too little, too late”.
I’m still waiting for his list of left blosphere extremists.
Corner Stone
@Genericlawstudents:
Ouch…good call.
Mr Furious
Perhaps Klein and Ridge were on the phone all night getting their “come clean” “past sins” and “too little too late” stories straight?
Turgidson
Joke Line has become far more sensible in the past year-plus. The McCain/Palin lie factory was too much for him to handle and he awakened a bit. But he still has a knee-jerk need to avoid aligning himself with the reality-based community completely. His fact-free bullshit about the public option is a clear attempt by him to express his disagreement with teh leftz. Now he’s trying to walk this fine line of calling the GOP out as the crazy knuckledraggers they are, while at the same time being critical of the Dems. Whatever floats your boat, Joe.
As Doug noted, I’m glad he’s stated in plain English that there is no comparison between the left and right at the moment, as far as sincerity and honesty go. But still. That fact is only slightly less obvious than the sun rising in the east.
MNPundit
You forget, the INTERNET made him this way. The first week he was blogging he was up to his old mainstream media bullshit and his readers called him on it with facts and figures. He’ll never be much of a liberal but since he started to post online, he has become a much better pundit able to see straight more often than not.
It is solely because when he got attacked by commentors, he actually took those critiques to heart. So Joe Klein has improved a hell of a lot in the last few years, and it was entirely because he chose to listen when his readers countered him with facts.
Tongue of Groucho Marx
“There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare…there are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection… these are policy differences, matters of substance…Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.”
NOBODY thinks this way. NOBODY. Somebody was obviously rushing to meet a deadline…
I think that Joe Klein is well aware of the maxim, “The party in power is arrogant, while the party out of power is insane.” While he kisses the asses of whoever is in power, however, he manages to appear completely insane.
Scott
Klein wrote: “There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama’s plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government.”
*************
But this isn’t “wildly improbable” at all. Whether one supports single-payer healthcare or not, the entire idea behind the public option was to work towards such a goal.
The idea came from Jacob Hacker and Roger Hickey (both of whom are advocates of single-payer) and they shopped it to the Obama, Clinton, and Edwards campaigns in 2008. The whole idea was that a public option was politically palatable — while a single-payer plan was not.
TAPPED had an interesting piece about the history of the public option the other day. No reason to deny what its purpose is, Mr. Klein. It’s not a “wildly improbable” fear. It’s precisely what the public option was designed to do.
Bender
Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.
Riiiiight, Joe. Suuuuure it is. I remember those two nuclear wars that Reagan got us into after he was elected each time. And how Bush was pushing old people out of their wheelchairs and down the stairs. And how we lost the war in Iraq.
Not to mention the granddaddy of all hyperbole and distportion: Global warming, errrrrrrrr, climate change, errrrrrrrr, global temperature stability, errrrrrrrrr, “I’M SAVING THE WHOLE PLANET, PEOPLE! LOOK AT ME!!”
Minor chords, right, Joe? Tiny issues. No big whoop.
It’s really easy and hacky to say that “my side does it, but not as bad as your side.” I mean, it doesn’t require any evidence, and if the other side points out ten counter-examples, all you have to say is, “I admit we do it — you’re just worse.” Weak, weak, weak.