Joe Klein nails it

by

by David Safier
I'm no fan of columnist Joe Klein, but today's column in Time lays out the disturbing truth about our current political climate and today's Republican Party:

How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?

The next few paragraphs go after Democrats for positions they have taken and tactics they have used which Klein dislikes. It's pretty harsh stuff. But he says of Democrats he disagrees with:

[They] are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don't retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.

But Republicans? It used to be, Klein says, the true crazies didn't run the party.

There was McCarthyism in the 1950s, the John Birch Society in the 1960s. But there was a difference in those times: the crazies were a faction — often a powerful faction — of the Republican Party, but they didn't run it. The neofascist Father Coughlin had a huge radio audience in the 1930s, but he didn't have the power to control and silence the elected leaders of the party that Limbaugh — who, if not the party's leader, is certainly the most powerful Republican extant — does now. Until recently, the Republican Party contained a strong moderate wing. It was a Republican, the lawyer Joseph Welch, who delivered the coup de grâce to Senator McCarthy when he said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Where is the Republican who would dare say that to Rush Limbaugh, who has compared the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler?

The Republican Party has forfeited its right to be an equal partner in our political debate, because it has given up any pretense of honest discourse.

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8 thoughts on “Joe Klein nails it”

  2. I’m willing say Joe Klein is about 50% less despicable than he was a year and a half ago when he couldn’t read a single line in the FISA amendment without having the lying Pete Hoekstra tell him it meant the opposite of what it said.
    Journalism should be like most other jobs in the U.S: you suck you get fired. The way it works in practice is exactly the opposite. By accepting this we hurt our democracy. That is why I don’t cut these bums any slack.

  4. You win, flouder, you win. I got a little carried away, I admit it, and Klein doesn’t deserve that much praise for getting things partially right once in awhile. I think Digby went too far on the other sides, but I concede the point. You’re right.

  6. Flounder, your comments are the reason I’m no fan of Klein, and I disagree with lots of what he says in the column about Democrats. But after saying “a pox on both your houses,” he makes a major distinction between the two parties. That’s the part I agree with wholeheartedly.

  7. If Joe Klein nails it, how come he couldn’t find a single name to put into his ‘Democrats that are only in it to make unions rich and to undermine intelligence’ category?
    Klein finds names for his good Dems category (Feingold), he finds them for his bad Republicans category (Rush), and he finds them for his honorable Republicans category (even though he has to invent them; google something like Mike + Pence + liar as example). He can’t give us a name for the category of Dem straw-men he invents.
    This is pretty classic Joe Klein…well except he didn’t get an anonymous quote from the completely hack-tackular Pete Hoekstra to fit in there somewhere.
    Don’t get me wrong, he had all the pieces to write a good article, but his careerist dishonesty got in the way.

  8. I learned that Chicago Politics of the Mob Rule Of Law opens the Public Treasury to Political Power and my agenda for America;” The Great American Shakedown!”

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