...I would almost be getting tired of Taibbi’s insistence on shooting fish in a barrel. Last week, it was Fox. This week, it’s Joe Klein.
He is the living, breathing incarnation of American "conventional wisdom" -- and what American "conventional wisdom" is is a spineless, slavish, power-worshipping watcher of polls who has no problem whatsoever denying today what he said yesterday, and is mostly interested in making sure he still has invitations to the right Beltway parties.Joe Klein has been this way for a long time—it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Anybody who appears to hate members of the blogosphere simply because they’re able to dig up things that he once said* and make it a lot harder for him to contradict himself whenever his place at the cool table is in jeopardy, needs a bit of professional help. However, what particularly set Taibbi off was this:
The war, you might have noticed, has not budged very many of these people from their places. Many of them now claim to be against the war. But they're the same people they were three or four years ago, and they're still quite openly sneering at the people who really were right all along. They seem to hate us even more, now that we've so obviously been proven right.
As always, I left plenty of good stuff behind, so go read it all.The illiberal left just hates it when I point out that the Democratic Party's naivete on national security -- and the left wing tendency to assume every U.S. military action abroad is criminal -- just aren't very helpful electorally. The fact that I've been opposed to the Iraq war ever since this 2002 article in Slate just makes it all the more aggravating. But it's possible to have been against the war and to hope for the best in Iraq...Listening to the leftists, though, it's easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure.OK, to begin with, I'm just absolutely tired of this bullshit coming from people like Klein who insist that "leftists" are "rooting" for American failure.
...
Then there's this whole business of liberals who are accused of "rooting" for failure in Iraq. I'm sorry, but the next pundit who whips that one out should have his balls stuffed down his throat. You cocksuckers beat the drum to send these kids to war, and then you turn around and accuse us of rooting for them to die? Fuck you for even thinking that. We're Americans just like you. You don't have the right to get us into this mess and then turn around and call us traitors. Your credibility is long gone on this issue. Shut up about us.
Beyond that, what you say doesn't even make any sense. For most of us, if we thought there was any chance this thing could work, we'd have been for it, or at least not so violently against it. Instead, our opposition to the war was based on our absolute conviction that it would end in disaster -- which it incidentally has. But according to Klein, if we see a guy step off the top of the Empire State Building, we're supposed to root for him to nail the dismount. The whole issue is irrelevant and absurd. This is a catastrophe, not a baseball game. "Rooting" is a kid's word; grow the fuck up.
Now, usually we try to avoid too much foul language on this site (why? I’m not totally sure), but Taibbi gets a free pass...mostly because he uses foul language so well.
It’s nothing new for a lefty (or leftist, your call) to complain that the ‘kewl kidz’ have made up a liberal strawman simply so they can balance crazies on the right, but for someone who supposedly considers himself ‘left of center’ to say that “leftists” are rooting against America (and points to Taibbi for pointing out that war isn’t a sporting event) is as infuriating as infuriating gets. (Time hiring Bill “Wrong About Everything” Kristol because, I guess, there was a need to give the right a chance to balance out Klein, the left’s representative, is almost as infuriating.)
In general (taking sports out of the equation, anyway), I think it’s safe to say I grew up with a fear of being wrong. I didn’t really care about winning arguments—I just cared about knowing I was on the correct side of the argument. If I wasn’t, I needed to adjust my thinking. As I got older, I maintained a certain viewpoint until a better one was shown to me, and I adapted that one. I thought everybody did this, at least when human lives were on the line. Four years ago, the “lefties hate America” thing was beginning to thrive, but there were plenty of examples of how/why that just wasn’t true. So, in my head, I figured that was the end of that...not with the Rush Limbaugh’s of the world, but with the “conventional wisdom,” at least. Boy, how naïve can I be?
* Speaking of people who wish those dirty hippy bloggers didn’t exist, Salon pointed this out to me today:
Today is Feb. 8, 2007, a fact we mention only because on Feb. 8, 2005, National Review (and now Los Angeles Times) columnist Jonah Goldberg had the following to say about Iraq in a back-and-forth pissing match with Juan Cole:Sniff, sniff. I’d point out that my definition of ‘bullying’ has nothing to do with holding the stupid words people say against them, but since I’m in a dictionary.com type of mood today...
"I do think my judgment is superior to [Cole's] when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now). This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. If there's another reasonable wager Cole wants to offer which would measure our judgment, I'm all ears. Money where your mouth is, doc."
Cole declined to make what he called "a wager on the backs of human beings."
So what does Goldberg have to say for himself now? He admits that he would have lost the bet if Cole had taken it, but he seems to resent the fact that folks are reminding everyone -- including media outlets who now carry his column -- that his underlying argument was so totally wrong. In a new post up at the National Review, Goldberg complains that the "vitriol and bullying of this crowd is something to behold."
bul·lySmaller or weaker people? Actually, that part sounds about right to me...the ‘weaker’ part, anyway.
noun, plural -lies, verb, -lied, -ly·ing, adjective, interjection
1. a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people.
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