Ned Lamont's victory over Joe Lieberman in last week's Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut precipitated the expected torrent of rubbish from left-wing blognuts and conservative wingnuts. There was a nauseating triumphalism on both sides, the unblinking assertion that this one poorly attended summer primary provided a lesson of earth-shattering significance to the future of American politics. Maybe it did, but I hope not.
Oh, we certainly wouldn't want Mister Man to have to get off his high horse of neutrality and actually stand for something, now would we? But you'd think he could at least get his facts straight:
State officials said turnout was a record for a Connecticut primary. Typically turnout in Connecticut primaries is about 25 percent, but was projected to be more than 40 percent Tuesday.
Not that Klein would ever let such an, um, incriminating fact get in the way of his sneering contempt at the unwashed nutroots. Why, we're just not as qualified to register our silly opinions as he is. After all, he wrote Primary Colors, though he refused to put his name on it. Also, house liberal for Time. Suck on that, blognuts!
See if you can follow The Serious Thinker's line of logic here:
Much was made of Cheney's venting, and it is a bit too easy, after six years of this bilge, to dwell on the Vice President's aura and miss the essential felony of the Bush White House—that it has tried to run a war without bipartisan support. Indeed, it has often attempted to use the war for partisan gain. To be sure, there is some grist to the Republican portrayal of Democrats as a bunch of wimpy peaceniks.
Make up what little mind you have, asshole. First of all the "essential felony" of this administration is not that they have "tried to run a war without bipartisan support", though that's certainly one of their cardinal sins. But Klein's choice of words here not only downplays the very serious nature of the Bushies' assault on basic Constitutional principles and long-held American mores -- such as, say, not dragging innocent men off the street and beating them to death with flashlights -- but it also betrays what he blindly regards as the greatest of all political aphrodisiacs -- the invocation of his boner word "bipartisan".
Klein, like Holy Joe, like Bullwinkle and the rest of the Vichy Democrats, just don't know when to say when. They do not understand that the jig is up. People -- not the Greenwich elite, not the MoveOn millionaires, not the Hollywood libruls, but a clear and consistent majority of American citizens -- have decided that enough is enough. The Cheney administration has had plenty of chances to act in a truly bipartisan fashion (that weird sound of tweezers massaging a lotioned vienna sausage is Klein masturbating furiously upon hearing his safe word). They have consistently acted in bad faith; they have treated even mild opposition or questioning of tactics like full-blown treason. Every Democrat who has reached across the proverbial aisle over the past six Friedmans has drawn back a stump.
So fuck your bipartisanship, you greasy little hack.
There isn't much point in detailing the chest thumping of the various blognut extremists. Their reach is minuscule, largely limited to the left's upper crust, and their angry spew is beginning to seem sooo six months ago.
Exactly how is this nonsense unlike anything, say, Ann Coulter has regurgitated for Matt Lauer or any other "responsible" media entity over the past several months? It's about as factual as Klein's initial assertion about the record turnout in the CT primary, and it has much the same intent -- to demean, to downplay the message and the facts, to marginalize the messengers. For someone so smug in his love for his own "evenhandedness", Klein has no problem playing fast and loose with facts when it comes to berating his own side. (Remember, Klein's a liberal. Just ask him, he'll tell ya.)
According to TimeWarner's own website, Klein's glossy two-ply mag has a circulation of two million. Doesn't say if that's per week, per month, or just the number of regular subscribers, but let's say it's per week. How many hits do Kos and Atrios (for starters) get per day, 400-500K? That's not a "miniscule reach", nor is it the "left's upper crust", whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. Does Klein seriously think that Eli Pariser, Kos, and Larry David have concocted some sort of "upper crust" conspiracy to pad numbers and demographics, presumably to make Klein's neutered version of "liberalism" look bad? Hell, it didn't take the nutroots to make that shit look bad; it just took them to consistently point it out and document it. It's not like Klein and his ratfuck cohorts were going to do it on their own.
But Pariser's anti-triangulation argument deserves attention because it represents the latest expression of a perennial self-destructive urge within the Democratic Party. "Originally employed as a survival mechanism by a Democratic President in the wake of 1994's Republican revolution," he writes, triangulation "no longer makes sense in an era when any attempt at bipartisanship" is seen as Democratic weakness "and exploited accordingly." He has a point. The Bush Administration has made a mockery of bipartisanship.
Read that again; not only does Klein manage to essentially contradict himself in the space of a mere few sentences, he does it with what he seems to think is some sort of rhetorical flourish (ooooo bipartisanship! he frantically typed with his free hand, trying to avoid splashing his keyboard with hot chunks of hobbit-chowder), but is nothing more than a "no shit, Sherlock" revelation. The Bushies have made a mockery of bipartisanship. You don't say.
I can see why Time shells out the large dollars for this dipshit to pitch a tent every week. It's like having a toothless circus geek in your backyard, furiously trying to gum through the chicken's neck. Fun for the whole family.
But Pariser and the MoveOniks can't seem to get Bill Clinton's success out of their craw.
Just when you think Klein can't possibly get more tendentious, he goes and finds a way. This is truly an astonishing display of abject cluelessness, and he oughta get fined by his employer for leaving that idiocy in his draft. Setting aside the obvious fact that Clenis hatred has been the fuel for current administration's electoral success and talking points, it's just a flat-out fucking lie. It is not that triangulation has been discarded as a useful political strategy; it is that there is nothing to be gained by triangulating with these people. Period.
I can't even be snarky or nasty about this point; I literally do not understand the level of cognitive dissonance from which Joe Klein, a self-professed liberal, manages to make such a ridiculous assertion. The Democrats have tried to work with the Republicans on a number of issues. Not only have their efforts failed, but they have mostly been called traitors, appeasers, and terrorist-enablers for their efforts.
But in Klein's world, safely removed from any actual action and participation, we're the assholes for not giving that nice Mister Cheney just one more chance. Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Hopalong. You like these assholes so much, you give 'em one more chance.
The rest of us have a country to take back, so this smug little retard can retroactively join in on the eventual celebration, thinking we won't notice.
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