For someoene engaged in "journalism", kelein is oddly vague about his targets and in his response to Greenwald. Given his obvious thin skin, Kelin probably doesn't want to provoke any more direct responses to his own work and does this by a faux "high road" version or evasion.

Being a "liberal" has been tainted for a long time and not just by conservatives. Any of us who lived through the heyday of tut-tutting "knee jerk" liberalism in the 70s has met any number of people whoare/were the liberal equivalents of the right wing noise machine. Many of us also watched with dismay as liberalism on an institutional and rank & file basis besically became a bunch of "college boys" who had only the most superficial and abstract approach to issues involvning poor or working class people. The rise of special issue liberalism in the 70s had much to do with this. I used taunt my feminist friends about their general ignorance of condescension toward working class women. Feminism fell off its economic rails very early and absically destroyed its links to women who had been looking to this movement for some salvation. Instead, the focus turned more and more to rhetoric and issues like abortion and pornography, which are valid but often were treatred with great disrespect to dissenting views.

My point here is that there are lots of ways to be a dissenting or iconoclastic liberal. My general annoyance with "middle class" issues and outlooks colors my dissent. I think feminists, enviornmentalists, and others have shot themeselves in the foot with their inward looking approaches to what should be mass issues. Liberalism also divorced itself from labor to its peril and, frankly, the peril of working people. It's only now as well paid professionals have become threatened that we see organized liberalism take another look at "working people".

As for Klein, his dissenting liberalism, like that of Richard Cohen and others, involves more of a non-desire to be labelled a liberal rather than coherent critique or competing philosophy. Whereas I'm a middle class professional with a PhD who enjoys lampooning the views of people who have gotten too insulated in their educated middle class world, Klein & Co. want the label of liberal, but don't want the responsibility that comes from it. They are a little like Alberto Gonzales, Claude Allen; they like being tokens, but they have no courage to do anything with their tokenhood. Primary Colors was an entertaining novel, but Kelein's journalism is a mess. the same could be said for Mickey Kaus or Richard Cohen among others. Their bad journalists and lazy writers, but they have their niche and they're not going to do anything useful with it.

Bush's invocation of "God" in this war always has been vague and unrooted in anything resembling theology. he has been vague about his "conversion" and his follow-up seemed to be Bible classes built around a simplistic, limited view of Christianity. In general, Bush seems to be unformed or at least inadeqautely formed person. He's been continually bailed out whether it be the draft, business failures, or the 2000 election. His main business experience was in a field that exists largely as a tax write-off. No one expects to make money with oil exploration, the real question is how to eventually get out of it when the losses do more than lessesn one's taxes.

Bush has managed to onscure his questionable National Guard history and his discussion of his drug and alcohol use has been as vague as his subequent "recovery". One need not go through 12 step to successfully recover from serious substance abuse, but there normally is some process of learning to how to deal with the world that previously had been blotted out. The denial and soforth seem reflect the absence of that. Bush never talsk about his business failures or his "youthful indecretions. For some reason, the media has continually gone along with this. I'm told Bush is quite charming in person, but on tv, he always has seemed brittle, in articulate, and childish. At best, I imagine him being a bit like a Willy Loman-esque uncle of mine--charming in a somewhat juvenile way that many people find amusing at first, but grating and troublesome as it wears on. Sadly, people who know him close up (like our friends in the media) seem less immune to this than the rest of us.