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"ALL ABOUT VANITY": Following up on yesterday's post, Greg has the definitive takedown of Joe Klein's infinitely irritating "OK, liberals may be right, but since they become wrong if you attribute the motives I just made up out of whole cloth to them, really I'm right and they're not" shtick. (As Jon Chait pointed out last year, Klein isn't so much a political writer as a bad theater critic; policy is always less important to him than silly, tautological personality impressions, which makes his audacity in calling Paul Krugman a "dilettante" all the more remarkable.) Greg ends his post with the following challenge:
Back up your arguments with facts and evidence. Produce one example of someone whose comments betray the fact that they're tacitly rooting for American failure. Quote this person. Explain why this person's quotes should be interpreted that way. If you manage to get that far, then maybe consider finding a second example, and even a third. That doesn't sound all that hard, does it?Asking Joe Klein to back up his generalizations with specific evidence? Things we can expect to happen first include a Royals-Pirates World Series, Danielle Steele winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the arrival of Godot.
--Scott Lemieux
