It’s been years since I raged at Joe Klein, mostly because I blessedly never come across anything by him anymore. Unfortunately, he has a substack and it came to my attention today. Nothing has changed. He’s still the hippie bashing piece of work he always was.
Get a load of this:
A metaphor that applies to my current political dismay: I am annoyed by Joe Biden but I am appalled by Donald Trump.
Why is that a metaphor? Because I am annoyed, chronically, by the Democratic Party but appalled, mortally, by the Republicans.
Which raises a question: I haven’t toted up the word count, but I suspect that I spend a lot more space criticizing Dems than GOPs. Why is that?
Well, because it seems in these DysTrumpian times, the Democrats are the only hope of saving our democracy, despite their idiot array of indulgences. They are misguided, but not fundamentally irrational. They believe in our institutions, even those—like the Supreme Court and the electoral college—that are weighted against them; even those—like the military—that they really don’t believe in. There is always the hope that a compelling argument made by the Sanity Caucus (which includes members of both parties) will have an impact on rational Dems. But rational Republicans I’ve known—I’m looking at you Lamar Alexander and Rob Portman—have been struck dumb, utter cowards in the face of Trump, even though they’ve retired from politics and have nothing to lose.
Why the silence in the face of an authoritarian who threatens our freedom? Their mute buttons are still turned on, impenetrable and irresponsible. They are a lost cause. So, I tend to write about Biden’s age more than Trump’s sociopathy, and about the Dems’ identity and woke obsessions more than the Republicans’ fundamental corruption. Because the Dems have to find a way to 51%, lest we lapse into Hungary or Russia.
That’s awfully helpful, don’t you think? Let’s pound the Democrats and make regular people hate them — so they will beat Donald Trump. How’s that supposed to work?
You know, if you can’t penetrate the right wing bubble then maybe just shut the fuck up.
I swear to God, this drivel is almost as responsible for how we ended up on the precipice of democratic catastrophe as the Republican descent into madness. Centrist jackasses like Klein’s annoyance at liberals is so bothersome to them they just have no choice but to help fascism by pushing “both sides” tropes suggesting that liberals are equally threatening. And then they blame the liberals for failing to stop the fascists.
This was once the dominant strain of thinking among the mainstream media and the Democratic party. Luckily most of them have wised up in the last few years. But Klein carries on, thankfully no longer as a star pundit on every cable news show as he once was, if only for the sake of my blood pressure.