Joe Klein, Ideological Extremist

The pooh-poohing of those who say poo-poo in the blogosphere continued today with this completely ridiculous post by Joe Klein, where he labels "left-wing extremists" as unnamed people who share an imginary set of characteristics in his own head ("corporations are fundamentally evil," "believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world"). He's so dishonest about this that he has to go all the way back to forced busing in the 70s to find an issue that supports his thesis.

Joe Klein is fighting a war in his head with hippies that haunt his nightmares. He has not updated his take on liberals with any empirical observation since approximately 1972. And as Scott Lemieux brilliantly notes, this leads to ridiculous behavior like this:

To get something constructive out of this, perhaps we can create a more specific typology: the characteristics you're likely to have if you're the kind of respectable pundit who can be the token "liberal" at prominent national publications and Sunday talk shows:

• During the run-up to an exceptionally disastrous war when prescient anti-war voices are scarcer in the mainstream media than people of color at a Nader rally, you can never get around to using your prominent media outlets to clearly disagree with the war, you do find time to suggest that you agree with the war, and yet years after the fact when the war is both an abject disaster and highly unpopular you suddenly start patting yourself on the back for having courageously opposed the war all along.

• Even as you nominally opposed the war after it became easy to do so, you can somehow never find anybody else who opposes it in the right way--"it's easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure," you claim, never naming any names or giving any quotes--and maintain that another Freidman is somehow always required for people to be Serious.

• You claim that people who oppose the Bush administration's illegal warrantless wiretapping program are as "out of the mainstream" as people who think that Terri Schiavo was three days away from walking out of the hospital, despite easily available public opinion data that shows the opposite.

• You make the transparently illogical assertion that the increasing insecurity of the contemporary job market makes the privitization of Social Security more desirable. (I guess this kind of reactionary and unpopular position isn't outside the mainstream--and certainly not comparable to the Schiavo wingnuts--but is "speaking truth to power" or something.)

• You claim, based on inferences gleaned from George Bush's alleged "authenticity," that the result of Bush's election would be "'a quiet, patient, and persistent bipartisanship,' with no big tax cuts or Supreme Court ideologues" and suggest that "Bush could easily retain Lawrence Summers at Treasury and Richard Holbrooke at the United Nations."

• You dismiss fundamental economic issues that might matter to people not in your highly elevated income bracket as "jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah."

Nobody could hit every one of these, could they?

I'm a little embarrassed to be taken enough by Klein's engagement with the blogosphere to have given him credit. He's clearly a milquetoast hack masquerading as a house liberal while reinforcing deeply conservative ideas about military and economic affairs. And he defends it by separating himself from imaginary "liberal extremists" who pretty much only exist at socialist food co-ops. There are millions of legitimate people who disagree with the neoliberal economic consensus and the neoconservative foreign policy consensus, which are backed up by decades' worth of evidence and data, and they can't be explained away by virture of their saying the word fuck every once in a while or wearing Birkenstocks. Get a clue, Klein.