And still an asshat even without a mic or a keyboard. Not an earth shattering observation but recent scuttlebutt supports it lest there be a shred of remaining doubt. To review, Joe Klein is a highly intelligent, witty and gifted writer with an impressive array of sources in virtually every government bureaucracy and news organization. Which would be swell, if only he used those tools to practice actual journalism on a regular basis. Which brings us to the latest anecdote:
Last week I went to a cookout on the beach here ... and for years I've known that one of their guests was Joe Klein. ... I was standing at the cookout minding my own business when Klein started pontificating for the rubes on how "surprising" and "shocking" it was that Grassley, of all people, should have come out and endorsed the "death panels" lie.
Apparently, Klein doesn't handle real world criticism well, which is a nice way to say he reportedly began shrieking and lying after being pinned down at the cookout by someone who was informed. Plausible? This is a man who after all managed to conjure up the one wrong reason to criticize neocon Charles Krauthammer -- don't trust him because he's handicapped -- despite a rather target rich environment in that respect, got busted cold by Glenn Greenwald for lying about FISA and then ran away saying of his own damn story "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right," and repeatedly sucked up to George Bush for being wrong about basically everything and sticking with it anyway as if that were anything other than a deadly tragic character flaw. This is the Jim Kramer of the neo-liberal pundit world, the journalistic equivalent of the guy who confidently predicts a stock will go up one day and down the next, and then points to the eventual trend no matter which way it goes and pronounces himself prescient and oh-so-very valuable.
Honestly, we in the hinterlands are left to speculate if it's simply too expensive to fire vainglorious knuckleheads who drag their newspapers to the brink of ridicule and ruin, and how allegedly competent news executives could possibly get themselves into that position again and again. While real hard-nosed reporters across the nation who provide in depth analysis and accurate even-in-hindsight work are laid off by the scores, too many Kleins of the world somehow keep landing premo gigs even though they could not have been more wrong for the last eight years if they randomly chose headlines from a barrel full of scrabble tiles. Maybe that's why so many 'famous reporters' and 'experienced editors' are reluctant to write about accountability: if they're held accountable, they're done for, and they know it.