Guilty Pleasures-- Fun With Mittens (and Joe Klein...)

[MonteLukast]

I got this a few weeks ago, and many of you have probably already seen it before... but with the bit of Romney snark going on, I just couldn't resist... not once I got this e-mail from David Sirota.

Now, Sirota's no big Kerry fan. But I LOVED what he had to say about Mittens.
Emphases mine and in italics.

Time to Finally Put Joe Klein Out to Pasture
By David Sirota

I'd like to nominate Time Magazine's Joe Klein for an award. By mastering the art of spewing back stale conventional wisdom, he has consistently set new standards for how pundits today should be obedient, neutered government spokespeople, whose only job is to transcribe without question what the latest politician told them at the latest cocktail party. And this week's piece by Klein (attached) does not disappoint - it shows why Joe Klein needs to be honored as a true icon of modern day journalistic failure.

Klein's piece is about what he calls a "remarkable" health care plan proposed by Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R). After slobbering all over himself in describing Romney's good looks and oh-so-incredible personality, Klein tells us Romney calls his plan "a personal responsibility system."

"slobbering all over himself"... ROFL ROFL ROFL

Sounds pretty good, right? Sure does to Klein, who from his comfortable, cushy perch at Time has rarely gone out and actually reported on the real-life struggles of ordinary Americans.

*snipped large chunk about health insurance*

Put another way, Klein's pathetically narrow intellectual boundaries never allows him to see that the idea that most people "choose" to be uninsured is a right-wing myth that plays on the subjective nature of the word "choose."

Klein happily swallows Romney's statistics claiming that about half of his state's uninsured "choose" to be uninsured.
What's more troubling, though, about Klein's piece is not how he idiotically regurgitates the subjective information given to him, but how he justifies and glowingly packages a proposal that is highly regressive.

This is Joe Klein at his most, well, Joe Klein: a totally insulated, morally bankrupt shill for the corporate conventional wisdom that dominates American politics. So stale, dried up, and unable to step back and think about what he's writing about, he serves as a conduit for smarmy corrupt politicians like Romney to package their corporate-written proposals as somehow populist and "remarkable."

So beautifully of one mind with me, on the subject of this pretty-boy, Stepford-wife-loving, too-many-kids-having, lookit-me-aren't-I-virile, hater-of-his-own-state governor.

It is long past time for Joe Klein to be put out to pasture. But then, that would be cruel and unusual punishment for the old dying cows that would have to listen to his inane B.S.

Ed Schultz has warmed up to Kerry. C'mon, Mr. Sirota. You can do it.

[ProSense]

1. I agree wholeheartedly! After his lame piece about Kerry and the Democrats

it's time to banish the old meadow feeder to pasture.

[blm]

2. Personally, I think Sirota has great potential and Kerry should HIRE HIM.

Sirota has a way of processing historic facts and applying them to today's issues and needs.

If he worked with Kerry and got into some significant and heavy history he could be a real asset to Kerry and the Democratic party.

[ProSense]

3. Well he did write that really great article: Follow the Money.

It was one of the more detailed pieces about Kerry busting the terrorists bank.

[MonteLukast]

5. I completely agree.

I also say that Kerry should hire Malcolm Gladwell, who in my opinion is one of the brilliant men to surface in recent years, and who was also quoted in this e-mail, though I snipped him out.

"The Tipping Point" and "Blink" give the lie to some of our most ridiculous and repressive ways we have of going about our daily lives.
One example is his way he approaches the smoking problem, in "Tipping".

Unlike a lot of Democrats out there, I do not support smoking bans, and I do not like the black-or-white, "no such thing as a safe smoker" attitude a lot of progressives have.
It kills imaginative solutions like Gladwell proposes-- make smoking less addictive or "sticky", and think about different people's smoking pleasure quotients, to start-- and it's the very kind of inflexible political orthodoxy the Repugs have been accusing the Dems of for years.

It's a little thing, and small potatoes compared to what the GOP is doing... but people. Three things we desperately need right now are pleasure, imagination, and clear-headed thinking. The "ban smoking now!!!" sentiment kills all three of those.

[TayTay]

4. This is great. Thanks!

Mittens is not doing the bulk of the work on the in-state Health care proposal. He just wants to swoop in and take the credit. (For the record, this details a very, very basic universal health care coverage plan for Massachusetts. John Kerry had mentioned it and has encouraged MassDems, who are 87% of the state legislature, to act on it and make it real.)

Thanks for posting this. I think David Sirota is a straight-shooter. I don't always agree with what he says and I think he has swung a bit too far away from Easterners (we are not all evil, well, not all of us anyway) but his stuff is good and worth reading. I think he is more in line with the grassroots of the Dem PArty than Joe Klein will ever be. (Joe Klein has written glowing pieces about JK in the past, but he is shallow and goes with the DC flow. Right now, the DC people still want JK to go away, so that is what Klein wants to. Until the tide turns and he doesn't. Fickle.)