Letters to the Editor
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Che Pasa:
Clearly he's serving a purpose at Time, their Token Liberal Pundit Who Warns Democrats, etc. That's more than one can say for Cohen at the WaPo, who seems to serve no function at all.
This is funny, and also true. Klein is cited only in two ways: (1) by right-wing Bush followers who love him the way they always loved The New Republic (in that "Even liberal X admits Y" way); as you can see, the likes of Shooter and people like that love him ("love to use him" is more accurate; and he loves to be used); and (2) by people like me to hold him up as such a vivid example of how our rotten punditocracy works and the roles they all play.
But what's funny about what you wrote is that it's true that Richard Cohen is just such dead wood in this whole process. Eleanor Clift has drifted into that sort of same irrelevance.
I think what happens is that they get spotted for the malleability and ease of manipulation, turned into the big bloated successful establishment-defending pundit, and then after a certain time, once they outlive their purpose, are just allowed to linger harmlessly as a reward for good behavior.
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Glenn, you have the stomach I don't
I really don't know how you are able to read through the articles of mainstreamers like Joe Klein or even "Time" in general. The job of mainstream pundits is quite simply to lie and obfuscate. That is what they do. They wouldn't be writing for a "Time" or a "Newsweek" if they didn't.
I guess they are useful to read in the same way it was useful to read "Pravda" in 1980- to gauge changes in the Kremlin apparatchik party line and make guesses as to policy directions and who was "up" or "down" in the pecking order of party hacks. But as for "news" and getting the truth- they are quite useless, indeed . . . worse than useless.
If one were to read only "Time" and the "The New York Times" and watch "NBC Nightly News" and confine their opinions to the parameters of thought laid out in them they would actually be more ill informed than someone who got their news only from SNL's "Weekend Update".
Growing up in the 70's and 80's my family subscibed to "Time Magazine"- everyone did. Somewhere the late 80's my mother cancelled the subscription after years of getting cover stories like "Superman, He's 50!". I have literally looked at Time Magazine maybe half a dozen times since then- in waiting rooms. Lately I haven't even seen it in those places either. It is worthless and mis-informing. One is actually dumber after reading it.
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Che Pasa:
Did you see this? The NY Editorial Board now has their own blog - modestly called "The Board" -- and they wrote (somewhat favorably) about the anti-Feinstein stuff:
http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/dianne-feinstein-backlash-on-the-left/
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@ Ché Pasa: Klein is a concern troll...
Clearly he's serving a purpose at Time, their Token Liberal Pundit Who Warns Democrats, etc. That's more than one can say for Cohen at the WaPo, who seems to serve no function at all. -- Ché Pasa
The village consists of concern trolls (fake liberals) and GOP operative attack dogs (everyone else). It is a great way for the village to keep the GOP in power because they all get to attack liberals. The concern trolls just pretend they don't want to but are forced by circumstances. That's what they call balance in the village.
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A Democrat to Joe Klein: Read the Founding Fathers and the Constitution!
Why don't Democrats respond to advice from the likes of Joe Klein by going back to basics. The Founding Fathers. The Constitution.
Start with the words attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
That is the essence of tough-minded patriotism.
Here is another statement most likely written by Franklin, with which I was not previously familiar, which sums up the modern Republican Party as well as anything I have ever read:
"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power." Apply this statement to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and to those who around them, from Ken Lay and Jack Abramoff to David Addington and John Yoo to Scooter and Dusty and Buzzy and Cookie to Rush and Billo to etc. and etc.
Glenn, you note the following about FISA: First, from its inception, FISA did not "protect the rights of U.S. citizens only." Its warrant requirements apply to all "U.S. persons" (see 1801(f))...
Maybe that language comes from the US Consitution. The 4th Amendment begins, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." The 5th Amendment states, "No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law..."
One wonders why pundits such as Joe Klein are so ignorant, not to mention so cowardly.
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Shorter Klein
"If the Democrats don't dumb down their policy to the point that it makes no logical sense or have any factual basis, they'll lose the next election because they can't--or refuse to--connect with the American people."
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No Matter How You Slice It
It's pretty apparent the electoral college strategy has to be to get a couple red states to go for us. That requires a certain kind of language.
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Another perspective
The genuine players in this sad game -- the ones Paul Rosenberg draws our attention to, among others -- have been well-served by the Joe Kleins, but not so much by the GWBS, or the Karl Roves. I wonder if the muttering we're hearing from places like the Iraq Study Group and the inimitable Mr. Friedman, that this was a good war run by incompetents, isn't actually a signal that these players, when pushed to it, might actually prefer a Hillary Clinton to a loony like Rudy Giuliani.
They still have to reconcile an electoral strategy -- call it for lack of a more inclusive term, the Southern one -- which produces wins at the expense of what I call the psychopath tax, with the geopolitical aims for the Pax Americana which are their real agenda.
This may be what Hillary and her advisors, no fools any of them, are looking at as their ticket to the White House. Many of the anti-war Democrats who support them seem to believe that once they're elected, they'll turn the tables on the bloody-minded oligarchs whose money they're currently taking by the truckload, but I'm not so sure. It seems to me that we might get some sort of half-reasonable form of universal health care, but I seriously doubt that our troops will be withdrawn from many of the thousand or so places around the world where they're currently deployed, least of all Iraq.
For my perspective here to make any sense, two things have to happen in the next year: 1) the anti-war left will have to convince the right-wing oligarchs and their military industrial complex that it commands more votes than the readership of DailyKos, enough votes, in fact to chase the Rush Limbaugh-James Dobson yahoos from the scene altogether, and 2) that as a consequence Hillary can beat both Giuliani and Obama.
Watching to see if Joe Klein changes his tune by, say, next May, might be a reasonable way to judge whether or not this scenario makes any sense. For the moment, the remote possibility that the Petraeus strategy might work, or seem to work, has kept everybody frozen at the starting gate. If that turns out to be an illusion, and the propaganda fog is awfully hard to see through at this point, even for us, then I think all bets are off.