It's safe to say the latest blogosphere-wide rallying point is the repeated, embarrassing, condescending wrongheadedness coming from the latest Serious Journalist/Foreign Policy Pundit Joe Klein. Klein, slumming alongside
the blog mob at Time's
new online offering, has used his corner of the soapbox - which he shares with other Serious Journalists like anal sex jokester Ana Marie Cox - to essay baseless criticisms at the liberals he considers right on being anti-escalation, yet wrong in their ...
rightness. In other words: Those opposed to the president's coming plan (pretty much everyone, but specifically the Democrats) may be correct, but they lack both the background research and seriousness required to cause the
Beltway cocktail party set to consider them anything but dirty hippies. That and we feel the way we do not because we actually believe what we're saying, but because we're rooting for America to lose.
Most of what Klein is saying is self-serving garbage in service of an agenda that places shallow, high school-level cattiness above
actual serious discussion of
actual serious issues. An agenda that, when employed by people like
Ann Coulter, ridicules actual seriousness in an attempt to keep political discourse at a third-grade level so she and her friends can take part. And an agenda that, when employed by people like Klein, ridicules actual seriousness in an attempt to limit the scope of the debate to the reality-free vacuum he and his friends built years ago to insulate them from an outside world that could never understand - nor truly appreciate - the conventional wisdom as put forth by the truly heroic, yet still stateside, opinion elite. Progressives, therefore, are doomed to reside permanently in a political adolescence - laughed at by the children and tut-tutted by the adults. But while Klein and his friends acted out scenes from "Mean Girls" and called it an adult discussion between serious people, Iraq
fell apart.
Thousands of Americans died. Thousands more Iraqis. America is now stuck in the middle of a civil war that shows no signs of getting better. Yet the president's answer is an attempt to save face by doing something nearly everyone believes won't matter, won't work and will only make things worse. To voice such an opinion, however,
makes you a "fool" and an "ill-informed dilettante" in Klein's eyes. His first target? Paul Krugman, whom Klein not only calls "(t)he latest to make a fool of himself", but also whom he accuses of not reading the counterinsurgency doctrine, not talking to key players and not doing his homework*. It remains unclear how the hell Klein knows these things, but a pundit of Joe's ilk never let reality get in the way of a good rant, so why start now? Getting back to Klein's argument, those who, accordingly,
have done these things (read, talk, study), though they may be wrong, are, in Klein's eyes, "serious people" more worthy of our attention by those who are right - but right for the wrong reasons.
Why right for the wrong reasons, exactly? Because, in a
follow-up, Klein writes that, "Listening to the leftists, though, it's easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure." Stunning in its likeness to the myriad meritless claims made against progressives by right-wing hacks far below Klein's "stature", this comment is remarkable in its assertion: That those of us are anti-escalation not because it is a wrong-headed move that will no doubt result in, among other things, more American casualties, but because we're actively rooting for more American casualties. In the same post, Klein says the "left-wing blogosphere" is "overpopulated by illiberal leftists and reactionary progressives" and makes yet another baseless claim: "The illiberal left just hates it when I point out that the Democratic Party's naivete on national security - and the left wing tendency to assume every U.S. military action abroad is criminal - just aren't very
helpful electorally." After
lying by saying that he was against the war since 2002, he then follows that up by challenging those who dare question his position. Writes Klein, "Can you honestly say the following: Even though I disagree with this escalation, I am hoping that General Petraeus succeeds in calming down Baghdad."
BooMan, in
quickly demolishing Klein's argument, employs the drunk driving analogy, an analogy I've
used before. But allow me to use another altogether. Say you've got two serious people - Joe Lieberman and John McCain, for instance - and those two serious people look long and hard at the following equation: 2 + 2 = _____? If, after examining the equation from every possible angle and taking every possible eventuality into account, these two serious, surely sober people tell you that the answer is clearly 5, are they not wrong? Further, upon repeated responses of "5" to the same problem, are they not only still wrong, but also manifestly so? If you were to pull someone off of the street and they guessed "5", that's one thing. Living as though "5" is the answer is another altogether. Now, if you allow a horse to take the quiz and the horse - let's call him Checkers - stamps his hoof four times, Checkers is and always will be more right than Lieberman and McCain, no matter his level of seriousness.
Anticipating the angry right-wing response, everyone realizes that war is more complicated than such a simple equation. However, the prevailing argument that someone's perceived seriousness, as defined by Klein, is more important than his or her rightness is not only intellectually dishonest, but it's also wholly irrelevant. Endorsing a plan that people from across the ideological spectrum view as incorrect makes you wrong, not serious. And the implication that those who
are right are somehow less worthy than those who aren't because they haven't done something Klein has no way of proving they haven't is equally abhorrent. To put it mildly, "serious" doesn't mean serious at all. It means "willing to blow smoke up Joe Klein's ass". And if
that's what it takes to gain the serious label in this country, then I'll happily remain an ill-informed dilettante for the rest of my natural life. Besides, are we to believe those "scholars" who convened recently in Tehran for a Holocaust denial conference - the ones who have no doubt spent years researching an incredibly moronic claim - are more serious than the high-school dropout who, when asked on the street, says, "Yeah, the Holocaust happened"? Being earnest about a ridiculous point doesn't make you serious. It makes you ridiculous.
Equally ridiculous is Klein's use of
statements like "Those of us who favor a withdrawal from Iraq should be doing some hard thinking about how to deal with these consequences"
and "All I'm saying is that those who oppose the war now have a responsibility to (a) oppose it judiciously, without hateful or extreme rhetoric and (b) start thinking very hard - and in a very detailed way - about how we begin to recover from this mess." Excuse me, Joe, but if President Bush and his backers in the administration, Congress and the chattering class had done some hard thinking - and in a very detailed way - about how to deal with the consequences of invading Iraq, perhaps we wouldn't have gotten into this mess in the first place. We have, however, and I find it ironic that, now that the Republicans have stolen the car and left it teetering at the edge of a cliff, they're turning to the Democrats they so often shouted down and are asking "Well, what would
you do? What will
you do to fix things?"
Can anyone tell me what the Republican plan for Iraq was? Can anyone tell me what it is now, other than hope and pray? Or "victory", whatever that means. Seriously, what is it? Is it staying, no matter what, as the American casualties mount? Is it gradually standing down as the Iraqis stand up? Because if that's the case, and what the president
said in 2005 - "Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are, in fact, working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave." - remains operative, what does it say that he has so drastically changed his tune? It says he
has no plan, other than trying to protect his legacy by throwing good money after bad in Iraq and hoping to hand this mess off to his successor. Some plan. Democrats, Joe,
have thought about how to end this mess. Just as they thought about ways to avoid it. Had
you done the research instead of lobbing empty, unprovable charges at people you repeatedly admit are right, you would have recognized that fact. And if you, like you said, have been opposed to the war since 2002, where were you when it mattered?
It's truly sad what you're doing, Joe. Taking pot shots at those who are right while celebrating those who aren't is unproductive, unforgivable behavior. While you tilt at imaginary windmills and perpetuate a childish debate about grave issues like Iraq,
people die. People die not only because their president needlessly sends them to Iraq to cover his ass, but also because people like you ridicule those trying to bring them home for not taking matters as seriously as you do. You're not being serious. You're not helping things. You're not the hero. You're just another empty suit in a long line of empty suits sending Americans to their deaths. An insular, insulated windbag more interested in nitpicking the messengers than listening to their message. A preening distributor of the conventional wisdom, insiderish blather that always seems to support the Republicans. But none of that matters, Joe. People are dying because of you.
Dying. What could be more serious than that?
* Not true (See Update V).
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