Monday, February 07, 2005

Joe Klein and other Embarrassments

I discovered a clip of Joe Klein talking about the State of the Union on the Daily Show via Boinboing. It was supposed to be funny, but it just reminded me of why Joe Klein is useless and an embarrassment. If Klein has an identifiable agenda, is it is as something of an adjunct to the "radical center."

But there is little that is legitimately radical about Klein. What is most salient about Klein is his lazy, pox-on-both-your-houses vibe. Klein is the type of guy who asks "why does politics have to be so alienating and yucky?" at the same time he works consistently to make Americans believe that it is.

Point is that Klein was about to launch into a tirade about how the Democrats were being merely obstructionist on Social Security, and oh-so uncivil booing Bush's lies, and that they don't have any ideas.

This is an effing script. Folks like Nick Kristof- you know, the guys who put the "liberal" in liberal media- make their bread and butter on this same thing. Like Kristof will say, as he did this past week, that Democrats are being big jerks by not presenting their alternative plan for saving Social Security. Part of the perception of Democrats and "the Left" more generally as not having any ideas and being merely obstructionist is because of the folks like Klein and Kristof who feel compelled to prove their bonafides as centrist and even-handed by accusing the Dems of crimes they have not committed.

As I was saying, Klein was about to launch into this tortured tirade, replete with Doug Gilesish, cringeworthy stabs at pop culture reference, and somehow Jon Stewart interrupted him. So Klein ended up eventually discussing how Bush's Social Security plan is a mess, an arcane, overcomplicated useless mound of policy crap, one more complicated than Hillarycare, one that won't do anything to improve SS's finances. Ya know, Joe, I'd say that's eminently deserving of straight-up obstruction.

The president builds this giant landfill of crap, designed foremost to destroy America's most popular social program, and the Democrats are supposed to act civil and offer counterproposals as if the Republicans are even capable of reasonable compromise? Nuh huh.

So Klein, in his quest to appear fashionably centrist, like all the effing beltway knobjobbers, was going to waste the public's time imputing madness to the Democrats for point-blank opposing the further corrosion of this fine country? That's what Joe Klein is good for- reminding us that politics is all gross and that both sides are just as bad when Republicans, as usual, are putting enormous efforts into trying to make Social Security fail.

I blame this on a twisted vestigial idealism that seems to haunt many of Joe's cohort. Joe and company are so frustrated by the fact that politicians are politicians, and politics is boring and yucky, that they find it necessary not just to cast aspersions every which way, but to be utter rubes when some phony, especially if he is an apostate like McCain or Lieberman, plays at being above politics. What I have called beltway knobjobbers aren't really conservative, they just tend to be carnival rubes for any PT Barnum who gives them the attitude they want to hear. Hence the naïf's tendency to see the Republican Party's cynical manipulation of the Iraq elections as something other than ultimately heartless, stagemanaged crap, or the willingess to endorse the president's destructive lunacy as bold. I wonder how bold they think martial law is.