Anonymous Putz

by digby

Joe Klein had an online chat at the Washington Post today. There are many amusing moments, but for me, this one took the cake:

Beeville, Tex: Without meaning offense, how responsible do you yourself feel for contributing to the political environment of canned political discourse? After all, you wrote Anonymous at a time when all political reporting seemed to center on undermining a sitting president.

Joe Klein: I always thought Primary Colors was a tribute to larger than life politicians. As for Bill Clinton, if I’ve been criticized for anything in my career, it’s being too favorable towards him. Primary Colors was a novel. No harm was intended. When Mike Nichols bought the film rights, he said: “There is no villain in this book.” Amen to that.

Oh really.

I’m tired and I can’t really write about this in the detail it deserves, but luckily Columbia Journalism review did a terrific post mortem on the “Primary Colors” fraud. Not only did santimonious prick Joe Klein personally help set the table for the asinine Monica Lewinsky scandal — he committed journalistic malpractice while doing it.

Here’s a highlight:

Once his Anonymous gambit took shape, Klein’s life, like Jekyll’s, became dangerously schizophrenic. Outwardly, he was the journalist-pundit, exuding moral rectitude, culling fact from rumor, reporting truth as he saw it – the man who once denounced as “despicable” those who were spreading charges about Clinton’s private life “to make money.” Yet secretly he worked to breathe life into the most scandalous suspicions about the Clintons in the course of making a pile. (Klein’s denial of any connection between the Clintons and his fictional “Stantons” is, of course, transparent nonsense.)

As the Newsweek pundit, he had written a scathing column (“The Politics of Promiscuity,” May 9, 1994) faulting Clinton for having a fragmented identity “composed of all sorts of persons”; for “always living on the edge, as if he were begging to get caught”; for “lawyering the truth . . . petty fudges, retreats, compromises, denials.” Sounds like a description of Klein himself.

He may have thought he could keep his professional duality concealed indefinitely. But ultimately he went the way of Jekyll, who lost control of his experiment and started turning into Hyde spontaneously, without warning, against his will, and was found out by suspicious colleagues. By the same token, Klein began wondering whether he was losing a grip on his original self (“I asked my agent: ‘Have I changed . . . ? Am I becoming Anonymous? Am I different now?’ ” he wrote in the Book Review piece.) Meanwhile, the relentless scorps closed in until, at last, The Washington Post hit pay dirt. The game was up.

Needless to say, in the frenzy that followed his unmasking (more than 500 articles and editorials, dozens of TV segments), Klein came under intense moralistic assault. The New York Times, for one, stung him in a lead editorial: “People interested in preserving the core of serious journalism have to view his actions and words as corrupt and – if they become an example to others – corrupting.” Meanwhile, Newsweek editor Maynard Parker was being lashed as well. He had known all along that Klein was Anonymous but allowed items to appear in the magazine which suggested that writers other than Klein were plausible suspects. The Dallas Morning News called this “a gross violation of journalistic ethics.”

Tell me again why Democrats are supposed to listen to insults about “inauthentic” politicians who listen to “self-serving” strategists from this man? I keep forgetting.

Hat tip to Tristram Shandy who has more here.

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