| Now, I have a confession to make. I used to like Joe Klein. Among all the pundits one was likely to read in the news media, during the first stage of its massive consolidation over a decade ago, his was the voice that sounded the most reasonable to me when "reasonable pundits" were white men who ranged from center-right to far-right in their outlook. I even defended Klein after the Primary Colors controversy, since I thought it was ridiculous to dismiss everything the man wrote simply because he'd tried to protect his anonymity. I still think it's ridiculous, but I've also learned how ridiculous the book was in the first place, another salvo in Broderism's war on the Clintons who "trashed the place."
And then it occurred to me: Joke Line is in over his head, defending the indefensible against arguments he never bothered to understand. Come to think of it, Joke Line has never written anything that even remotely approaches the quality of Glenn Greenwald's work on an average day. Glenn is simply out of Joe's league as a thinking man.
Joe: it's not just that broderism has been wrong about everything lately. It's not just that broderism ignores the American people you and Broder claim to speak for. The real problem is that you broderites just aren't very bright.
Maybe in the day when America had a broad middle class with a high-school education engaged mostly in manufacture, people like Joke Line could appear sagacious. But not now. Too many Americans just aren't as isolated and parochial as Joke Line's caste needs us to be in order for them to remain relevant. America is finally better educated than that. The beltway press simply picked the worst possible time to enable the most retrograde, anti-intellectual, and authoritarian bunch of freaks since the Confederacy.
Yes, you've learned to look serious by being boring and you hope no one notices you're an idiot. And yes, the right blogsphere has aped your chimp act, heaping high the grand words and coffee-table book references to history this and civilization that, with bloggers like Tacitus emptying out the thesaurus of Freedumb™ like some schoolboy writing love poetry in his high-school French, but none of this will make excrement into shoe polish.
Your content is an insult to our intelligence.
People are dead because you didn't do your job.
So, why do we blog? Because we're better than you. We don't have to make an annual pilgrimage to America, we work here. We flock to the blogsphere, with all its bad behavior and static, because we're sick of having our intelligence insulted. We're sick of being lied to. We're sick of smug pundits who still have jobs after years of being systematically wrong about everything. I'd rather wade through 300 posts of amateur snark and pr0n-spam just to find links to three new things I didn't know than sit through 30 minutes of Skeletrina the Walking Blowjob giving me headlines and soundbites or fumbling to A12 to read the rest of James Lileks gushing about some inconvenience of the overly-convenienced.
I hang my hat in one of the nastiest food-fights in the left blogsphere. It's a wonder Atrios puts up with us at all. And yet, even for the f-bombs and shrillitude, you couldn't swing a dead cat in the comment section of Eschaton without hitting lawyers and Ph.D.'s: from all over the world, a wealth of experience in a dirty glass. I pity anyone left sucking on the teat of the MSM. They have been left ignorant. The MSM's content is worse than useless. If you want to be dumb, stick to the dead tree and bleach-blonde bimbo-babble "news."
No? Don't feel like relying on some dumbass with a mere J-school degree to mediate reality for you? Don't blame you, considering their track record.
Well then, step right this way to the opium den of the American id. Take a face from the ancient gallery and unburden yourself of your darkest fears. Tell us what you know. Tell us what you saw. Lend us your expertise in whatever corner of the working world you cut your teeth. We are all of us useful people. We work for a living. And here we are, bypassing the over-consolidated, heavily captalized, counterproductively-centralized, quasi-soviet piece of shit that American media has become. Let us consider how best to purge the beltway, an ingrown and infected oligarchy of petty jealousies and low cunning, ringed round with an inflammation of circus hawkers and flacks who invoke and demand the awe and attention of all us mere Americans for the shining canker on a hill, taut with a seething suppuration unceasingly churned by the purely ventral cravings of a few well placed crawlers and their assorted suckers-up.
And if you can make a point and turn a phrase, you're a hit (at least for thirty seconds). Beats the hell out of listening to some beltway fop clutching his pearls because some non-journalist dared to criticize failure, doesn't it? And now we can forget that we ever wasted a half-hour letting some idiot with bad evangelist hair 'feel the news at us.' Come to think of it, I haven't watched a news program on TV since the first few months of the war.
Rag and bone pickers in a vast wasteland, my friends and I will help each other stay well informed because nobody else will, while Republican news executives all chase FOX News' audience, which is leaving feet-first. Perhaps some wily entrepreneur will think to develop this ready-made audience. Perhaps "market forces" will finally make one of their rare appearances at an American media outlet.
Now that would be a man-bites-dog story!
In the meantime, we've given up waiting for someone else to do it for us. This is the open-source reality-based community, and there's no sense worrying about what Joke Line thinks, because he doesn't.
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