Now, I’ve enjoyed what Klein has had to say over the years, but if the following from Eric Alterman is true, he may have just joined the three ring circus of partisan hackery in a BIG way.
From MSNBC, emphasis mine:
I went to a breakfast this morning sponsored by HBO and the Council on Foreign Relations where Tina Brown interviewed Julia Sweig, author of Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century, here, before a small gathering of media and foreign policy bigwigs. Sweig, a Latin America specialist, has written a subtle, historically-informed study about the phenomenon in which she sought to distinguish between those aspects that are structural and destined to plague our relations with the rest of the world as long as we are the world’s only superpower—which actually, is not as long as it sounds—and those aspects which are purely the fault of the incompetence, malevolence, dishonesty, etc. of the Bush administration. It was a useful discussion with many useful tributaries and give and take with the audience and we all felt better for it.
That is right up until the very last moment when, after someone brought up the question of the whether the Democrats will be able to present an effective alternative to Bush in the next election, Joe Klein shouted out, “Well they won’t if their message is that they hate America—which is what has been the message of the liberal wing of the party for the past twenty years.�
Now, it could be that Klein was perhaps making fun of the hacks. Good lord I hope so, because the alternative is very, very sad.