A quick word on Klein

Joe Klein has -- surprise! -- more complaints about bloggers.

This time, he's upset because people took him to task over the Jane Harman quote/vote reversal on the Iraq supplemental. He makes a somewhat compelling case regarding standard journalistic practices and why they led him to write his story as though the deal were done. I get it. Makes a certain amount of sense to me. So, fine.

Here's where we part ways:

[T]he smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable.

Do I disagree that sometimes the smart stuff is drowned out? No. Do I disagree that the tone can sometimes be fierce, bullying, or often witless? Mmmm, no. How about that often, anyone who doesn't move in lockstep is savaged and ridiculed? Hmm, no, not with that, either.

My difference with Klein here is this: blogging hasn't changed things here. Some portion of your readership always thought these horrible things about you (though admittedly, there are probably plenty of people who have recently come to that). All blogs have done is allowed them to say it, and for you to hear it.

Taking the blogs out of the equation for a moment, I would be willing to give him credit for the insight that sometimes "the left" can agree with you, but sometimes it doesn't, and that sometimes that disagreement is polite and sometimes it isn't.

Except that it's not actually an insight.

Not to bloggers, and really, not to anybody at all. But especially not to bloggers. I think it took me all of about ten seconds to find out that in any medium where people can talk back to you on at least an almost-equal level (accounting for the differences, if any, between a top-level post and the comments to it), some significant portion of that audience will make it a practice to tell you you're an idiot and you suck. The size of that population increases tenfold when you get a platform like Time magazine, or the front page of Daily Kos from which to hold forth.

Baseless an inappropriate criticism can come from any corner, left, right, or center. Sometimes bloggers -- including Joe -- are wrong about whether or not it actually is baseless or inappropriate. But if you think it is, the right answer is rarely to go out of your way to write about how stupid and ignorant you think the people who wrote it are.

Unless, of course, you plan to write it in the magazine, where there's no two-way communications. And what do you know? That's just what he did.

Which sets up exactly what Joe was looking for: a situation in which you get to say millions of your readers are "witless," and if they dare respond to you, you get to hold up your self-fulfilling prophecy and show everyone the "bile" as proof that you're right.

Witless as I am, I'm happy to oblige, and to take this opportunity to remind him that while I understand the Harman goof (to whomever you'd care to attribute it), I still haven't gotten an adequate explanation of the Obama goof (to whomever you'd care to attribute it).

And what a shocker, by the way, that that story ran in the magazine and not the blog, too.