If nothing else, Time's Joe Klein knows how to make a horse's ass out of himself, and in this case it's simply because his timing is impeccable:
I was at a Blanche Lincoln town hall meeting in Russellville, Arkansas, yesterday--and the number of people who believe that the President has larded the government with communists (!) was astonishing. One woman said there were four known communists in the government and that she'd researched it on the internet. When I asked her afterwards, she said environmental adviser Van Jones, legal advisor Cass Sunstein (who was last spotted being excoriated by the left for supporting the FISA revisions), someone named Lloyd and she didn't remember the fourth. And wasn't it suspicious that Obama had all these czars working for him--that was a Russkie commie term, wasn't it? When I asked, the woman admitted that, among other things, she occasionally listened to William Bennett's conservative radio show. I pointed out that Bennett had once been the Drug Czar, appointed by Ronald Reagan. Life sure can be complicated sometimes.
OK, so now Joe Klein has invoked the name of Van Jones who, by his own admission was a communist of the Maoist stripe back in the '90s, and who has spent much of his time this particular week apologizing for calling Republicans "assholes" in public. I'm not sure laughing off the lumpen proletariat over Van Jones is what you need to be doing, Joe.
The great thing, though, is that Klein's timing gets even better:
I was later told by a local observer that many of these vomitous, disgraceful notions were the fruit of Glenn Beck's fruitful imagination. "We are living Glenn Beck's fantasy life," said this audience member. The amazing thing remains not only the unwillingness of responsible Republicans--a term that is in danger of becoming an oxymoron--to call bull-- on this, but also the willingness of many prominent Republicans to join in the slinging of garbage.
What kind of garbage, Joe? In 2004 Van Jones publicly endorsed the notion that 9/11 was the work of the Bush Administration, and that George W. Bush was complicit in the murder of over 3,000 people. Would that be the sort of garbage you were talking about, Joe?
The sort of garbage Glenn Beck found out and you missed, Joe?
When you're a so-called 'professional journalist' and you can get your ass handed to you by Glenn Beck, perhaps it's time to give it up and get a real job more suited to your talents. In Klein's case, that new career should probably include his repeating the phrase "Would you like fries with that?" several hundred times a day.
You know, there's a reason nobody reads Time anymore...
Many conservatives turned their backs on McCain, and voted for Obama, thinking they'd "teach Republicans a lesson" for their many years of liberalness. People said McCain wasn't conservative enough, that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between one party and the other, one candidate of the other. blahblahblah
I think we've got all the evidence we need that they were wrong.
Posted by: Guesst | September 04, 2009 at 04:20 PM