IMITATIONS OF LIFE: Charlie sits with Justice O’Connor!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 2013

Part 2—His next imitation of life: Imitations of life define the work of our national press corps.

On Monday night, Charlie Rose staged an imitation of debate, as we noted yesterday. For the record, this imitation occurred on his nightly PBS show, not on his daily CBS program.

These days, if a broadcaster doesn't host two daily programs, it means he doesn't count.

On Monday evening, Rose pretended to moderate a debate between Paul Krugman and Joe Scarborough. In fact, Rose was staging an imitation of this familiar broadcaster function. This fact became clear quite early on, when this strange exchange occurred:

ROSE (3/4/13): But in terms of the short-term, Paul doesn’t think we have a spending problem.

KRUGMAN: No, right! We’re not—

ROSE: You think we have a spending problem in the short term?

SCARBOROUGH: In the short term? Right now? This year?

KRUGMAN: Next year?

SCARBOROUGH: I don’t think over the next three, four, five years it’s going to cause a serious problem. I think—I think if you look again at the projections, if you look at what, what we need to do for Medicare, Medicaid, I think we need to start planning for that right now and that’s I think where we disagree as well. I think Washington can do two things at once.

KRUGMAN: But let me ask a question. Would you support an extra $200 billion a year in spending on infrastructure and education right now?

SCARBOROUGH: Oh yeah, I talk about it all the time.

KRUGMAN: Then you’re—

SCARBOROUGH: And I go around, and I talk, I talk to Republicans all the time. And I’ll tell you the example I use...

Just twelve minutes into an hour-long program, a remarkable moment had occurred. In a nation which is screeching and yelling about $85 billion in spending cuts this year, Scarborough had proposed something quite different.

He had proposed $200 billion per year in additional federal spending! This is precisely the type of proposal for which Krugman routinely gets flayed!

In a world which wasn’t imitation, a moderator would have seized the day. He would have declared a remarkable point of agreement between the two combatants.

Krugman tried, several times, to note the oddness of Scarborough's statement. But Charlie Rose, the program’s host, was involved in an imitation of life.

Perhaps he was tired from all the nonsense he had pimped on his morning program. Perhaps he didn't want to offend against Very Serious Pseudo-Centrist Scripting, to which he is a bit of a slave in the budget area.

But Rose completely failed to declare this striking point of agreement. Instead, he let this italicized comment by Scarborough stand (our emphasis added):

”I think if you look again at the projections, if you look at what, what we need to do for Medicare, Medicaid, I think we need to start planning for that right now and that’s I think where we disagree as well.”

That’s where they disagree as well? Scarborough had just described a point where the sachems weren't disagreeing at all! But in line with Very Serious Scripting, Scarborough did what had to be done:

He had to pretend that he was piling up points of disagreement with Krugman. And so, immediately after agreeing with Krugman, he said he had done just the opposite.

In an imitation of life, Rose let this bullroar stand.

How odd! In the evenings, Rose’s eponymous program appears on PBS, which is widely reputed to be our smartest source of news. All around the United States, people tune to PBS thinking they’re getting the goods.

But the bulk of our American discourse is composed of imitations of life—imitations of discourse. Consider what happened when Rose sat down with Sandra Day O’Connor last night.

The transcript and tape aren’t available yet; we’ll have to work from memory, as we did yesterday morning. But at one point, Rose began talking with Justice O’Connor about a famous case: Bush v. Gore, the important decision which made it clear that George W. Bush was going to reach the White House.

This is a very famous case. In a rational world, a major journalist would want to question O’Connor about it. As you may recall, all five Republican appointees ruled in the way which favored Bush—and all four Democratic appointees ruled in the way which favored Gore! Adding to the appearance of politicization, the Court appended a peculiar coda to the decision. It said the ruling couldn’t be used as precedent in any future case.

Or something like that. And by the way:

How much controversy did this case create? A very large amount! “The decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history,” Alan Dershowitz pungently wrote, and he was hardly alone in this general view. In a rational world, a journalist would want to ask O’Connor, or any other Justice, about this famous decision.

That didn’t happen last night. After seeming to raise the topic, Charlie quickly backed away, thus creating the false impression that questions had been asked. But then, the same thing had happened the night before, when Rachel Maddow pretended to question O’Connor about the same topic.

Maddow rarely interviews people who don’t come from her tribal clique. She also tends to defer to power, at least when power is physically present right there in the room.

None of this makes her a bad person. It does mean that she tends to stage imitations of interviews with high-ranking folk like O’Connor.

For ourselves, we’re fans of Justice O’Connor. We could listen to her talk for hours. We’re transfixed by the western inflections which derive from her youth on a very large ranch on the New Mexico-Arizona border.

Very few people lived in that place at that time. Those inflections are rarely heard.

We also admire Justice O’Connor for the clipped, no-nonsense way she tends to respond to questions. But then, people like Rose and Maddow almost always defer to O'Connor in such interviews. They stage imitations of life.

Tomorrow, we’ll post the transcript of what was said as Rose backed away from Bush v. Gore. If you watch the Maddow segment, you will see Maddow back away from the famous case on two separate occasions.

Maddow staged an imitation of an interview; one night later, so did Rose. But then, such imitations virtually define our Potemkin public discourse.

The evidence shows that we rarely notice. Even worse, our intellectual leaders pretty much never do. People! Such things aren't allowed!

Tomorrow: Joe Nocera’s imitation of life

The Washington Post sings the praises of KIPP!

TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2013

The Post tends to be quite selective: A new, major study has examined the performance of the KIPP charter schools.

At the Washington Post, Jay Mathews examined the study last week in this lengthy blog post. (The comments from his readers are also well worth reading.) On Saturday, the editors produced this editorial.

At the Washington Post, the editors love the KIPP schools. As we read their editorial, we were struck, as we often are, by the highly selective way the Post covers public school issues.

For ourselves, we aren’t critics of the KIPP schools; we’re also not fawning idolators. Many good things can be said about KIPP, as the editors love to prove.

Here’s how their editorial started. We highlight the additional gains recorded by students in KIPP schools, according to this study.

We start with the Post's childish headline:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (3/2/13): KIPP doubters proven wrong

Officials of KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) have become accustomed to the doubters who think the success of the fast-growing charter-school network is too good to be true. KIPP’s positive outcomes are the result not of its unique learning approach but rather, so the familiar critique goes, of its ability to attract the best students with highly motivated parents. Now comes rigorous research that should put an end to those suspicions and hopefully prompt discussion of what other schools might take away from KIPP’s experience in working with low-income students.

A study conducted by the independent firm Mathematica Policy Research, which analyzed data from 43 KIPP middle schools, found that students in these charter schools showed significantly greater learning gains in math, reading, science and social studies than did their peers in traditional public schools. The cumulative effects three to four years after entering KIPP translated, researchers found, into middle-schoolers gaining 11 months of additional learning growth in math and social studies, eight months in reading and 14 months in science. KIPP, which operates in 20 states and the District, is portrayed as among the highest-performing school networks in the country.

We will admire the people who run the KIPP schools until we’re shown that we shouldn’t or can’t. That said, the Post may be over-exulting a bit.

Let’s talk about those score gains.

Obviously, it’s a good thing if students gain “11 months of additional learning growth in math [and] eight months in reading.” That said, those gains are acquired over three to four years—and this is part of the way KIPP students assembled those gains:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL: What is different is a high-intensity approach to learning in which KIPP students are in school longer (an average of 9 hours a day, for 192 days a year, compared with 6.6 hours per day, for 180 days, for traditional schools) and spend an additional 35 to 53 minutes on homework each night. Whether these methods can be adopted by traditional public schools is unclear; even KIPP officials acknowledge the difficulty of successfully ramping up operations. But it should be equally difficult to turn a blind eye to this study and not consider the possibilities its findings offer other children.

We find that highlighted passage sobering. To their credit, KIPP kids put in a much longer, much more challenging school day and school year. In some ways, their limited additional months of learning (achieved over three to four years) remind us of an important point:

There are no miracles in the school business, despite the constant efforts of shills and hacks to hand us feel-good miracle stories about low-income schools.

Eight additional months of reading (over four years) is not a miracle. It is, instead, an important achievment, an accomplishment children and teachers seem to have worked for quite hard.

People who care about low-income kids should be very angry when hustlers parade about the country offering silly miracle tales. Almost always, miracle tales are false. The example of KIPP's hard-won success helps us see this point.

(Remember when Charlie Rose sat on his ass like a potted plant and let Wendy Kopp tell her self-serving miracle tales about Teach for America? People who care about low-income kids should be angry at Kopp and Rose.)

At the Post, the editors tend to overstate when it comes to “education reform.” Consider one additional point about the new KIPP study:

In their opening paragraph, the editors reject the idea that KIPP does well because of “its ability to attract the best students with highly motivated parents.” In the following passage, the editors attempt to shoot down that notion:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL: Debunking claims that KIPP’s success is rooted in “creaming” the best students, researchers found that students entering KIPP schools are very similar to other students in their neighborhoods: low-achieving, low-income and nonwhite. A typical student enrolling in a KIPP school scored at the 45th percentile in his or her school district in reading and math, lower than both the average in the school they attended and the school district as a whole.

It’s true: According to this study, KIPP schools do not draw the highest-achieving students away from the local public schools. According to this study, students who chose to attend the KIPP schools were quite average for their school and their school district. (The Post massages this point at the end of this passage. If you’re in the 45th percentile in your school district, that pretty much means that you’re average.)

That said, the children who go into KIPP schools enter an environment in which they’re surrounded by other kids who, like themselves, have parents who wanted something better. They now attend a school which is full of strivers. It’s hard to measure for this effect, but it surely provides some sort of advantage to people who teach at KIPP schools. (This point is discussed at length in the comments to Mathews' blog post.)

If those additional gains at KIPP are real, those gains are truly important. But they were achieved by a lot of hard work over three or four years, and a slight advantage may be involved because KIPP kids all choose to be there. Having said that, we think the Post is right to call attention to the gains achieved by KIPP schools. They were also right to offer the warning we posted above. (“Whether these methods can be adopted by traditional public schools is unclear.”)

KIPP schools report academic gains which are very hard-won. Because KIPP is a symbol of “education reform,” the editors rush to discuss those gains. That said, there’s another impressive set of gains the Post refuses to report. Those are the gains recorded by black and Hispanic kids in the nation’s traditional public schools over the past twenty years.

As we’ve noted again and again, those gains are actually very large—unless you read the Washington Post or the New York Times, in which case those gains don’t exist. The editors should be ashamed of themselves for the ways they report in this area. In our view, each of these newspapers should explain why they hate black children so much that they won’t stoop to report their substantial achievements—unless those achievements occur in a school which is run by KIPP.

The Post is deeply selective about public schools. Cheating under Rhee gets disappeared. So do the remarkable gains achieved in our regular public schools.

If you read the Washington Post, you simply aren’t told about those gains. The only gains you’ll hear about are gains which occur under KIPP.

Someplace else you won’t hear about that: You won’t learn about those gains on MSNBC, where the fiery liberals would jump off a bridge before they’d discuss our black kids.

Breaking: The Howler and Shipp, together at last!

TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2013

A long, thirteen-year campaign: Here at THE DAILY HOWLER, we’ve been running E.R. Shipp for president ever since her ombudsman column for the Washington Post on Sunday, March 5, 2000.

For our real-time reaction, just click this. Shipp’s column has only become more insightful as the years have rolled by.

Well sir, this very evening, at 5 PM, we’ll be doing The Marc Steiner Show with Shipp herself! At present, Shipp is serving as “Journalist in Residence” at Morgan State. Steiner’s show is heard on WEAA, Morgan’s blockbuster, powerhouse NPR affiliate.

Just noticed: This is the thirteenth anniversary of Shipp's righteous and accurate piece, which was also completely ignored.

The ages at which they crashed and burned!

TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2013

Young journos flew close to the sun: Big Republican leaders don’t agree with Obama about the budget because they don’t know what he's proposing!

Only a crackpot would say such a thing. Or an ambitious young journalist?

Why on earth did Ezra Klein write that ridiculous column? We don’t know, and Chait and Krugman aren’t willing to say that he did. But as we pondered this ludicrous work from our latest ambitious young scribe, we checked the ages at which earlier versions of same crashed and burned.

It pretty much started with Janet Cooke, who had to give her Pulitzer back because she’d invented her story. (Along with the resume which got her hired.) But in the past twenty years, we've seen a string of ambitious young journalists break all the rules as they went for the gold.

Does Ezra Klein belong in this class? We don’t have the slightest idea—but can you imagine him going on cable and making the ridiculous claim he made in that long, absurd column?

At any rate, these are the ages at which five other scribes crashed and burned. The potential rewards were great for these young high-fliers. So was their foolish behavior:

The ages at which five famous young journalists crashed and burned:
Janet Cooke, the Washington Post (26)
Ruth Shalit, the New Republic (24)
Stephen Glass, the New Republic (26)
Jayson Blair, the New York Times (27)
Jonah Lehrer, the New Yorker (31)

Lehrer turns out to be the greybeard! We may have left one or two out.

How great are the potential rewards if you can get away with these scams? The leading authority on Lehrer’s life offers this intriguing note: “Lehrer owns the historic Shulman House in Los Angeles, California.”

What the heck is the historic Shulman House? The leading authority on the site tells us this:

WIKIPEDIA: The Shulman House is a mid-century steel home and studio in the Hollywood Hills. In 1947 architectural photographer Julius Shulman asked architect Raphael Soriano to build him a house and studio in the Hollywood Hills. By August 1947 the design was decided upon, and construction began in the early months of 1949. The building took nine months to complete and was occupied in March 1950. Garrett Eckbo designed the landscaping. It has remained unaltered and the Shulman House was designated a Historic-Cultural Monument by the City of Los Angeles in 1987.

The house was sold for $2,250,000 on November 24, 2010 to Jonah Lehrer, who resides there with his wife...

Garrett Eckbo isn’t Gordon Gekko, although the names are close.

The rewards and the temptations are great for these pseudo-brilliant young strivers. You might think of the Shulman manse as The House Young Ambition Bought.

Our favorite sentence about Janet Cooke: The leading authority on Janet Cooke offers a comical fact. It seems especially relevant in this week of our lords:

“Although some within the Post doubted the story's veracity, the Post defended it and assistant managing editor Bob Woodward submitted the story for the Pulitzer Prize.”

Could it be that it takes a bull-shitter to get taken in by same?

IMITATIONS OF LIFE: Charlie Rose!

TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2013

Part 1—A potted plant referees Krugman: Last night, on his PBS show, Charlie Rose staged what we’d call an imitation of life.

Earlier in the day, he had spent several hours hosting CBS This Morning. He pretended to deal with serious topics, also provided our fluff.

Now, Rose was moderating an hour-long debate about the most important budget issues of the day.

Given the subject matter, Rose had assembled a slightly odd couple for his debate. On the one hand, he had booked Paul Krugman, one of the world’s most highly-regarded economists.

Debating Krugman would be Joe Scarborough, a former member of Congress who now hosts his own morning show on MSNBC. The program is built around tired old Bickersons gender-war shtick. This animates the promulgation of insider conventional wisdom.

Scarborough isn’t a major economist—but that doesn’t mean that this couldn’t have been a very worthwhile hour. You see, Scarborough speaks for the Washington insider class, for the inside players whose conventional wisdom dominates almost all media-driven public discussion.

Krugman tends to disagree with this crowd concerning our current budget challenges. As such, last evening’s show might have tested Prevailing Insider Conventional Wisdom against the contrary presentations of a major, world-class economist, albeit one who won't deal frankly with Ezra.

The evening didn’t turn out that way, largely because Rose—himself a creature of the plutocrat swells—behaved like a potted plant.

Transcripts and tapes aren’t available as we post, although they eventually will be. Working from memory of the 3 AM clash, we’ll list three key points where Charlie Rose failed to act:

If you end up watching the tape, please look for the part, early on, where Scarborough concedes the discussion. He says he too would like to see several hundred billion more dollars in federal spending this year, money which could be used to fund infrastructure projects and to rehire teachers.

If this had been a boxing match, a referee would have stopped the fight, declaring a technical knock-out. At that moment, Scarborough said he agrees with Krugman’s heretical views—the views which get Krugman ridiculed by the Washington Insider Class.

A referee should have stopped the fight. He could have awarded this part of the fight to Krugman, then moved to some other topic. Since the combatants also agreed that we need to lower future health care costs, he might have asked them to debate the best way to do it.

Charlie didn’t say a word! Instead, he behaved like a potted plant, helping viewers miss the fact that JoeScar conceded to Krugman.

For us, a second interesting moment was permitted to pass a bit later.

JoeScar made an accurate point. He noted that, contrary to liberal conventional wisdom, Republicans were tougher on President Clinton back in the 90s than they have been on Obama.

Scarborough told an amusing anecdote about how much he himself hated Clinton back in the mid-1990s. Since nobody hates Bill Clinton now, this could have produced an intriguing moment, had Charlie been willing to act:

Tell the truth! Wasn’t Scarborough describing one of the basic starting points of our current political dysfunction? Wasn’t he describing the start of our current hyper-partisan politics, in which Republican leaders urge their party's rubes to believe all kinds of crazy things about all major Democrats?

JoeScar’s anecdote offered a path. Charlie played potted plant.

We were struck by a third intriguing moment. It came quite late in the show.

In fairness, we thought Charlie had played a slightly more constructive role in the program’s second half hour. Now, as the combatants summarized their cases, an intriguing moment occurred.

Scarborough offered a standard piece of familiar old Tim Russert shtick. When Social Security began, he said, the average life-span was 62 years—and benefit payments began at age 65!

Off-camera, Krugman apparently snorted and/or rolled his eyes. Scarborough interrupted himself, then declared that Krugman is just like Al Gore! Like Al Gore, he’s a big know-it-all, Scarborough said. He thinks he knows more than everyone else. How dare he act that way?

Charlie could have stepped in there, creating a magical moment. He could have explained why people like Krugman have been snorting for many years about this hoary old chestnut. After explaining, he might have asked JoeScar if it might not be time to put this old chestnut away.

You’ll see Charlie do something like that when you see the hedgehog jump the moon. As a creature of the plutocrat class, Charlie engages in imitations of life. He doesn't critique standard shtick.

All week, we’ll feature imitations of life. These imitations of life will be torn from the pages of the daily news. In these imitations, tribunes of the upper-class create the impression—the false impression—that real discussions are being conducted inside the newsrooms and studios of Gotham and DC.

No such discussions are occurring. Our Potemkin discourse is a series of imitations of life.

Tomorrow: Joe Nocera

On the flip side, one of Scarborough’s virtues: Scarborough is a perfect hack concerning budget matters. He performs a more constructive role when it comes to other aspects of party politics.

Long ago, he told the truth about a topic regarding which our liberal leaders agreed to be potted plants. As we moved toward war with Iraq, he told the truth—on Hardball, no less!—about what had occurred during Campaign 2000, the campaign which gave us Iraq:

SCARBOROUGH (11/18/02): I think, in the 2000 election, I think [the media] were fairly brutal to Al Gore...If they had done that to a Republican candidate, I’d be going on your show saying, you know, that they were being biased.

Wondrously, Scarborough was speaking to Chris Matthews, ring-leader of the brutal behavior to which he referred. And guess what?

If “they” had done that to a Republican, Scarborough would have gone on Hardball and said they were being biased! That’s because conservatives fight back against such treatment, real and imagined. In those years, we liberals accepted whatever we were handed. And we refuse to talk about that era now.

(More accurately, Scarborough would have tried to go on Hardball to say that. There’s no chance he would have been booked.)

Scarborough told the truth that day in November 2002. Even as he did, fiery liberal Frank Rich was still trashing Gore, who was saying that we shouldn’t go into Iraq.

Gore was just faking, the pompous liberal hero insisted, even complaining to brilliant Don imus. He was simply positioning himself for his next White House run!

Frank Rich is a truly terrible person—and he remains a liberal hero! At any rate, Scarborough was telling the truth at that time; Rich was still burning the witches.

Rich staged many imitations of life during the Clinton-Gore era. We assholes swallowed his bullshit down whole. Rachel loves the great man dearly, right to this very day.

There is no way to fawn hard enough when Frank Rich appears on her show!

Further aspects of the Ezra Klein con!

MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2013

Chait and Krugman swallow the apple in defense of the guild: Yesterday morning, Ezra Klein published the world’s most ridiculous column in the hard-copy Washington Post.

The column appeared at the top of page one of the Post’s Business section. See our earlier post.

Yesterday morning was the first time we had seen the column. The day before, we had spent a chunk of time on the pointless column Ezra published in Saturday’s hard-copy Post. (In fairness, “pointless” is better than completely insane.)

Back to Sunday’s column, the one which was completely ridiculous:

As part of the peculiar new tradition by which newspapers give away their content even before it can be purchased, Klein’s hard-copy Sunday column appeared on-line on Friday afternoon. When it appeared, Jonathan Chait lightly challenged its premise, while failing to say that Klein had written the world’s most ridiculous column.

To read Chait’s reaction to Klein, click here. You will see that Chait massively understates the lunacy of what Ezra wrote. He describes one small part of the lunacy, completely ignores all the rest.

Having been subjected to a wet-noodle challenge, Klein offered a post in which he manfully noted that his original column was wrong.

On Sunday morning, Paul Krugman got into the act. In this post, he cited the back and forth between Chait and Klein—but he too failed to describe the complete insanity of Klein’s original column. Even worse, Krugman complimented Klein at two different places for “manning up” about the fact that he had been wrong.

“Props to Ezra,” he fawningly said. Krugman praised Klein for correcting himself, failed to ask why any liberal would have published such manifest nonsense in the first place.

Our view? Klein’s original column was so absurd that it was almost surely a con—a pile of bullshit he composed to please hard-copy Business readers and kiss the ass of Republicans. (A column by Ezra appears every Sunday in the hard-copy Business section.) Because the column was so absurd, it’s very hard to believe that Ezra could have believed what he wrote.

Chait and Krugman don’t seem to want to go there. They are members of a club; Ezra is in the club too. Professional courtesy seems to have these tyros covering for their ambitious young friend. If you doubt that, once again:

Review the way Chait understates the sheer absurdity of what Ezra wrote. In his challenge, Chait almost wholly ignores the vast sweep of Ezra’s ridiculous claims.

We’ll return to our original question from earlier today:

Does anyone think that Ezra Klein really believed what he wrote in that column? We will continue to guess that he was just casting himself in the role of Very Serious Boy, typing a column which would be pleasing to the Post’s Sunday Business readers.

To that original question, we’ll now add two more:

Does anyone think that Jonathan Chait wasn’t pulling his punches when he critiqued Klein’s column? Does anyone think that Krugman told you what he really thinks?

The swells will always take care of the swells! In the process, you the rubes get disregarded. People like Klein will get nudged away from their “mistakes”—in this case, from a “mistake” which was so absurd that it can’t have been done in good faith.

Klein wrote the world’s most ridiculous column. Anyone with an average IQ can see the sheer lunacy in what he wrote. Obviously, Chait saw how absurd that column was. Your follow-up question is therefore this:

Why didn’t Jonathan Chait just come out and say so? Why did he choose to tiptoe around, covering up for his friend?

A similar situation within a different guild: Later this week, we expect to do a final post about the widely misunderstood boob song of Seth MacFarlane. We’ll review the way other comedians leapt to poor MacFarlane’s defense.

How far did Penn Gillette take the nonsense? On CNN, he said The Onion shouldn’t have apologized for dropping that C-bomb on 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis! And yes, that is what he said.

The guild will always protect the guild! If you doubt that, just read Chait’s soft-soap reaction to Klein.

Klein lives to con you another day. On the bright side, some day he'll cover for Chait!

Kathleen Parker airbrushes one of the e-mails!

MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2013

Not unlike Pravda of old: Yesterday morning, we reviewed a deeply clueless piece at Salon concerning the boob song of Seth MacFarlane. To read that post, just click this.

Yesterday afternoon, we spent some time puzzling over Ezra Klein’s latest column. See our previous post.

Our public discourse is a rolling clown show, a reliable forum for incomprehension, improbable tales and manifest disinformation. That said, we were also struck by the column Kathleen Parker wrote concerning poor Bob Woodward and his persistent night sweats.

Parker has been a bit of a weathervane over the past twenty years. During the Clinton-Gore and early Bush years, she was reliably center-right. She would advance the standard narratives and group judgments, although she was much less nasty in her Clinton/Gore-bashing than “liberals” like Maureen Dowd were.

As Bush’s presidency began to collapse, so did Parker’s orientation. With the arrival of Obama, she seemed to reinvent herself, adopting a posture which was much more centrist to center-left.

Now, the Washington Insider Crowd has started to turn against Obama. And sure enough! In yesterday’s Washington Post, Parker offered a Pravda-esque piece about the Woodward flap.

On the Sunday TV programs, major players, including Tom Brokaw, rolled their eyes at Woodward’s recent ridiculous cries de coeur. By way of contrast, Parker produced one of the greatest kiss-up columns of all time.

She sang the praises of poor Woodward’s greatness—and she seemed to say that Woodward had been threatened by the goons in the White House. On-line, the word “threat” still appears in the headline. This reflects the early part of Parker's column, where she says that Gene Sperling’s recent e-mail “appeared to be a veiled threat aimed at one of the nation’s most respected journalists.”

This was very scary stuff! Why can't we all get along?

Parker told a frightening tale. That said, can you spot the part of the story which got airbrushed from her frightening piece, much as they once did at Pravda?

PARKER (3/3/13): To recap: Woodward recently wrote a commentary for The Post that placed the sequester debacle on Obama’s desk and accused the president of “moving the goal posts” by asking for more tax increases.

Before his piece was published, Woodward called the White House to tell officials it was coming. A shouting match ensued between Woodward and Gene Sperling, Obama’s economic adviser, followed by an e-mail in which Sperling said that Woodward “will regret staking out that claim.”

Though the tone was conciliatory and Sperling apologized for raising his voice, the message nonetheless caused Woodward to bristle.

Again, Woodward’s kneecaps are probably safe, but the challenge to his facts, and therefore to his character, was unusual, given Woodward’s stature. And, how, by the way, might Woodward come to regret it? Sperling’s words, though measured, could be read as: “You’ll never set foot in this White House again.”

Poor Woodward! He bristled when he read the e-mail which appeared to contain a veiled threat! But how strange! Parker forgot to mention the e-mail Woodward sent to Sperling in reply—the e-mail which went like this:

E-MAIL FROM WOODWARD TO SPERLING (3/23/13):
Gene:

You do not ever have to apologize to me. You get wound up because you are making your points and you believe them. This is all part of a serious discussion. I for one welcome a little heat; there should more given the importance. I also welcome your personal advice. I am listening. I know you lived all this. My partial advantage is that I talked extensively with all involved. I am traveling and will try to reach you after 3 pm today.

Best, Bob

Does it sound like Woodward felt threatened? Does it sound like he "bristled" at what Sperling wrote? Actually no, it doesn’t! For that reason, this e-mail was airbrushed out of Parker's column. Parker's frightening story collapses if she simply tells her readers what poor Woodward actually wrote.

To read both e-mails, just click this. To see the current state of American journalism, just read every word of Parker’s column.

Parker typed a frightening novel. As in the good old days of Pravda, this required a bit of airbrushing.

But then, the product which poses as journalism is virtually defined by work of this type. This product is composed of novels, scripts and tribalized tales along with the two basic types of facts—zombie and forbidden.

We rubes still treat this product as news. If our society wants to function, this product must be blown up—“reformed.”

Can Ezra possibly believe his new column!

MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2013

The three faces of Ezra Klein: Over the weekend, we caught most of Ashley Judd’s 94-minute presentation on C-Span concerning women’s health.

Judd spoke with a roomful of graduate students in public health at George Washington University. To watch the whole session—it's very impressive—go ahead: Just click here.

We were impressed by the depth of Judd’s knowledge and experience. During the lengthy Q-and-A period, we were also impressed by those graduate students—by a string of well-informed, deeply intelligent, deeply involved young adults.

We were impressed by Judd because we hadn’t known she was so deeply involved in public health issues. In part, we were impressed by those graduate students because we had spent the bulk of the day sifting through the manifest bullshit which constitutes so much of our journalism.

A fair amount of that time had been devoted to the work of a 20-something journalist.

Those 20-something graduate students were manifestly smart and sincere. By way of contrast, that 20-something journalist had written a very unusual piece.

Question: Does anyone think that Ezra Klein really believes what he wrote in this latest piece? Can anyone think he's sincere?

The piece in question appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post. Although it was hard to find on-line, it sat atop the first page of the hard-copy paper’s Sunday Business section.

On-line, it was hard to find a link to Klein’s piece; it didn't appear under Business at all. That said, does anyone think that Klein believes what he wrote in that high-profile hard-copy piece?

In fairness, Klein’s piece made wonderful Sunday reading. It helps establish Klein as a very sensible young man—you might even say, as a Very Serious Young Person. It’s a fairly typical offering from Hard-Copy Ezra, a personage who seems to be differ from two other well-known public figures—Wonkblog Ezra and Cable News Ezra, Hard-Copy Ezra’s siblings.

Ezra’s high-profile Sunday piece seems to make a remarkable claim. According to Ezra, Republicans can’t reach agreement with Obama concerning the budget because the Republicans simply don’t know what Obama has proposed. No sane person could believe such a thing—but Ezra was selling this claim from the start, in a type of feel-good piece which is perfect for Sunday Business.

Here's how the way 20-something began, improbable headline and all. According to Ezra, the nation’s ongoing budget debacles stem from a misunderstanding:

KLEIN (3/3/13): What we have here is a failure to communicate

On Thursday, I attended a background briefing with one of the most respected Republicans in Congress. The rules on these gatherings is you can’t name those involved, but you can quote them. That gives the lawmaker room to be a bit more honest without fear of immediate public reprisal. The discussion was frank and, in a way, encouraging—it suggested that some of the gridlock in Washington is simply the result of poor information.

In that opening, Ezra implies that this (unnamed) Republican solon was being unusually honest. Ezra also advances a rather strange notion—he seems to suggest that our budget gridlock is the result of misinformation.

Yes, yes, we know—technically, Ezra only said that some of the gridlock may result from misinformation. But as he continued, he advanced a patently strange idea—when it comes to our budget debacle, this leading Republican is unaware of even the basic things Obama has proposed:

KLEIN (continuing directly): Would it matter, one reporter asked the veteran legislator, if the president were to put chained-CPI—a policy that reconfigures the way the government measures inflation and thus slows the growth of Social Security benefits—on the table?

“Absolutely,” the legislator said. “That’s serious.”

Another reporter jumped in. “But it is on the table! They tell us three times a day that they want to do chained-CPI.”

“Who wants to do it?” said the legislator.

“The president,” replied the reporter.

“I’d love to see it,” laughed the legislator.

You can see it. If you go to WhiteHouse.gov, the first thing you’ll see is an invitation to read the president’s plan to replace the sequester. That plan is only a page. “Savings from Superlative CPI”—another way of saying chained-CPI (consumer price index)—is one of the items in bold type.

In that passage, this leading Republican says he doesn’t know that the sky is blue. Everyone who follows the budget debate knows that Obama has routinely proposed “chained CPI;” it’s one of the president's proposals which the liberal base abhors. But according to Ezra, this leading Republican didn’t know that Obama has made this proposal, even though the proposal is right there in bold, right on the White House web site!

Is it possible that this Republican was simply lying about this? Ezra bats away that notion:

KLEIN: Now, one possibility is the legislator was simply lying. But I doubt it. Politicians don’t like to make themselves look uninformed in rooms full of reporters, and such cynical messaging would be out of character for this particular member of Congress. What we have here, rather, is a failure to communicate.

“What we have here is a failure to communicate!” Ezra decides that this veteran Republican really and truly doesn’t know that Obama has routinely offered chained CPI.

In bold type.

Is it possible that Ezra is right—that this unnamed Republican solon knows less than the average blogger? Everything is possible! For that reason, it’s possible that some individual veteran solon is just amazingly clueless. But at this point, Ezra transits from one unnamed solon to a string of major Republicans, including three major players he names.

According to Ezra’s clear implication, a whole lot of Republicans are in the dark about a whole bunch of Obama’s proposals. Here’s the way he starts moving beyond that one clueless pol with no name:

KLEIN (continuing directly): Chained-CPI isn’t the only policy concession the White House has made that seems to have escaped the notice of its negotiating partners. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell talks about what’s needed for an agreement, he calls for “serious means-testing for high-income people” on Medicare. When Sen. Lindsey Graham said he’d be open to a deal that would replace the sequester with $600 billion in revenues if the White House would reform entitlements. I asked his office what Graham meant. “He’s discussed things like raising the Medicare eligibility age, means-testing entitlements, etc.,” said Kevin Bishop, his communications director.

It’s a continuing source of frustration among Republicans that the Obama administration, which seems so comfortable taxing the rich, isn’t comfortable with “means-testing” entitlements—which is to say, asking wealthier seniors to bear a heavier burden for their health-care costs or receive less coverage from Medicare.

But on page 34 of the White House’s most recent budget, President Obama proposes to do exactly that...

According to Ezra, Republicans also don’t seem to know that Obama has proposed “means-testing” our social insurance programs. In this passage, he names two major Republican solons, plainly suggesting that they don’t know what Obama has proposed.

By now, you’d have to be barking mad to believe the suggestion that Ezra’s advancing. But just to seem Even More Serious, he mentions a third proposal concerning which Republican leaders are apparently in the dark:

KLEIN: Republicans also believe that supplemental Medicare insurance—typically called “Medigap” policies—are increasing costs because they often wipe out any co-pays or deductibles for seniors. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate committee that manages Medicare, has taken particular aim at these plans. “Multiple studies have found the Medigap policyholders use about 25 percent more services than Medicare enrollees who have no supplemental coverage, and about 10 percent more services than enrollees who have employer-sponsored retiree coverage,” he notes in a policy paper.

The administration agrees that Medigap policies are a problem. It’s proposed a 15 percent surcharge on Medigap policies that cover first-dollar expenses. The idea is to make those policies less attractive to seniors. Privately, administration officials say they’d be willing to go quite a bit further.

Please note: Ezra never explicitly says that Hatch, or any other Republican, doesn’t know what Obama has proposed about Medigap. But that is his plain implication, given the mountain of manifest nonsense which has preceded this passage.

By now, we have been told that Republican leaders simply don’t know what Obama has proposed in three policy areas. The information is right there in bold, but major Republicans—people like McConnell—apparently haven’t looked! A person would have to be out of his mind—or very ambitious—to advance such a ludicrous notion. But as he closes, Ezra drives the point home, offering only one or two minor qualifications:

KLEIN (continuing directly): That’s not to say that the White House necessarily goes as far as all Republicans would like—though they complain that it’s often hard to figure out exactly how far Republicans want to go, as they have a habit of handing over targets for how much money they want to cut from Medicare without detailing the policies that would get them there.

Still, over the course of dozens of conversations with Democrats and Republicans on Medicare, I’m convinced that the zone of agreement is larger than many participants in the debate realize. What’s holding an agreement up is, in part, that Republicans are far less willing to compromise on taxes than Democrats are to compromise on Medicare and Social Security. But what shouldn’t be holding an agreement up is that top Republicans simply don’t know the compromises the White House is willing to make on Medicare and Social Security.

Ezra Klein is a Very Sensible Person, the kind of highly presentable boy you might take home to the elders. Speaking to the Post’s Business readers, he makes a truly Neptunic claim: “top Republicans simply don’t know the compromises the White House is willing to make on Medicare and Social Security.”

Covering his keister a bit, he does acknowledge, though only in passing, that “Republicans are far less willing to compromise on taxes than Democrats are to compromise on Medicare and Social Security.” But that's the type of obvious fact you’ll hear emphasized by Cable Ezra. Hard-Copy Ezra is a different person—a person who is willing to make the most absurd claim on earth.

Does anyone believe, for even a minute, that Ezra Klein really believes this nonsense? As we have noted above, everything is possible. Because he is a very young person, it’s possible that Ezra is so credulous—perhaps so inclined to trust authority figures—that he really believes that people like McConnell and Graham haven’t checked to see what Obama is proposing.

It's always possible that he believes that. But if this young person believes such twaddle, why is he allowed anywhere near a major American newspaper?

For ourselves, we have no idea why Ezra wrote this manifest nonsense. It’s hard to believe that he could believe this foolishness—but he has printed plenty of bullshit before in his Hard-Copy persona. In the past, Hard-Copy Ezra has assured the world, on several occasions, that Paul Ryan is the world’s most sincere, well-intentioned and forthright man. And on the week he scored his contract with Bloomberg, he wrote a front-page piece in the Post about how amazingly great Bloomberg-style “education reform” really is.

Was that a Ka-CHING moment? Or did it reflect an honest belief? We'll let you be the judge!

So how about it? Do you believe that Ezra believes the manifest bullshit in Sunday's piece? Or do you think he was simply creating feel-good stuff for the Post’s Business readers? Whatever it is, the eternal note of sadness came in when we checked the gullibility quotient of Ezra’s readers. In the first dozen comments, quite a few readers swallowed this bullshit whole—although Commenter 10 seemed to think that Hard-Copy Ezra was lying:

COMMENT 10 (3/1/13): Quote: “Now, one possibility is the legislator was simply lying. But I doubt it. Politicians don’t like to make themselves look uninformed in rooms full of reporters, and such cynical messaging would be out of character for this particular member of Congress.”

You're kidding, right?! Mr. Klein if you're actually serious, you really need to get out of DC more. Can you honestly recall the last time a GOP pol stood before a room of reporters and didn't proceed to dish out a litany of misinformation and propaganda? Please tell us you were just trying to see if we're still paying attention with that bizarre remark. In any case, the whole thing doesn't make any sense in the service of your point. Let's say we take the GOP pol at his word—if he's as senior and respected as claimed, he has entree to the president. Why didn't he take it upon himself to simply ask the president if he would be willing to negotiate on these items? It's painful to observe such an otherwise smart pundit like yourself be so willingly played like this.

Even this otherwise sceptical person is sure that Ezra is smart. That said, this commenter doesn’t seem to understand the way the new mandarins work:

Commenter, please! Cable Ezra will join the snark about the way Republican pols routinely stand before rooms of reporters and dish out a litany of misinformation and propaganda. Hard-Copy Ezra seems to be trying to service a different crowd.

In conclusion, go ahead—watch that tape with Ashley Judd! As you do, focus on that roomful of 20-something graduate students.

We were struck by how bright they are—and by the fact that they’re plainly sincere.

They aren’t stuffing millions of bucks in their pants. Just by way of possible contrast, what is Ezra doing?

The semiotics of MarFarlane’s "boob song!"

SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 2013

Please bring back Walter and David/O'Hehir does it again: We are now in the seventh day of our Lord post-Seth MacFarlane’s “boob song.”

One week ago, the world’s emptiest fellow sang his famous song about boobs. Yesterday, Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir tried to limn the semiotics of the highly complex affair.

You’ll rarely read a piece on any subject which is so thoroughly uncomprehending. In the past week, MacFarlane’s song and jokes have launched a thousand leaky ships, but O’Hehir’s may be most amusing.

O’Hehir never quite manages to grasp why people found MacFarlane’s song offensive, inappropriate and/or in bad taste. Straining to comprehend the flap, the gentleman starts like this:

O’HEHIR (3/2/13): Humor is a complicated phenomenon, and highly dependent on context, as Seth MacFarlane recently learned. The Oscar host’s much-discussed performance–and in particular his quasi-ironic opening musical number, “We Saw Your Boobs”–has inadvertently launched a cultural debate about several interlocking subjects, including sex and gender in Hollywood, whether p.c. attitudes are destroying humor, and the role of Twitter and other social media during major cultural events. That’s without even getting into the unresolvable and inherently subjective question of what’s funny and what’s not.

Nothing MacFarlane did, from the boob song to gags in dubious taste about women’s weight, domestic violence, Mel Gibson and John Wilkes Booth, pushed anywhere near the outer edges of the comedy envelope in a world that has already featured Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Sarah Silverman and Sacha Baron Cohen. MacFarlane’s problem was about semiotics, setting and reception. He was a white guy in a nice suit doing old-fashioned song-and-dance numbers on the Oscars, and fairly or not he came across to many viewers as smugly reinforcing the male-centric power structures of Hollywood and society. (You can accuse those other comedians I mentioned of many things, but not of kissing up to power.) Some observers, like Pete Hammond of Deadline, have suggested that a double standard may be in play, and that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler could have cracked the same jokes, or worse, and not gotten any grief for it. That’s kind of true, but also misses the point. All humor has a subject and an object, and if Fey and Poehler tell those jokes they become different jokes with different meanings.

This opening presentation is just stupendously clueless. According to O’Hehir, McFarlane’s now-controversial song was actually “quasi-ironic.” In part, the negative reaction it has received is a matter of “semiotics!”

Before he is done with his piece, O’Hehir will ponder the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes as he reviews the complexities of the reaction to that quasi-ironic song. But for sheer absurdity—for pure untrammeled incomprehension—note again the comical way he ended his second paragraph:

Some observers…have suggested that a double standard may be in play, and that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler could have cracked the same jokes, or worse, and not gotten any grief for it. That’s kind of true, but also misses the point. All humor has a subject and an object, and if Fey and Poehler tell those jokes they become different jokes with different meanings.

Neptunically, O’Hehir imagines a world in which Tina Fey and Amy Poehler “cracked the same jokes.” He then speculates about what the reaction would be.

But as every human being must know, Fey and Poehler wouldn’t ever crack the same “jokes.” It’s impossible to imagine such an event occurring here on this planet.

O’Hehir doesn’t quite seem to know that. Instead, he tells us that, if they did crack those “jokes,” the jokes would take on different meaning. After which, he offers us this, letting us know he’s quite mad:

O’HEHIR (continuing directly): I’m not trying to answer the question of whether MacFarlane was a misogynistic goon sent to enforce the patriarchal order or a misunderstood satirist who fell victim to feminist groupthink. This is actually one of those cases when both things can be true; MacFarlane’s staunchest defenders and harshest critics have all made valid points about the competing signals being delivered on Oscar night. This points us back to the fact that comedy is one of the most poorly understood aspects of human behavior and psychology, and that it’s nearly impossible to explain what makes a joke funny, or what it’s actually “about.” To quote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (one of my favorite online resources): “Almost every major figure in the history of philosophy has proposed a theory, but after 2,500 years of discussion there has been little consensus about what constitutes humor.”

If anything, I think MacFarlane’s Oscar-night performance was too clever by half, and resulted in a profound failure of messaging and symbolism...

If anything, MacFarlane’s performance was too clever! That said, what accounts for his “profound failure of messaging and symbolism?” Having studied the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, O’Hehir gives us a choice! According to O’Hehir, Seth MacFarlane actually is “a misunderstood satirist who fell victim to feminist groupthink.” On the other hand, he also was “a misogynistic goon sent to enforce the patriarchal order.”

This is actually one of those cases when both things can be true!

We don’t know if we’ve ever read a piece so transcendently uncomprehending. At heart, O’Hehir seems unable to understand why people found the boob song offensive and/or tasteless (or sexist or misogynistic). Because he’s completely color blind in this area, he offers us endless amusement as he flounders about—for example, in this passage:

O’HEHIR: Considering what we know about MacFarlane’s politics–he’s a liberal, an Obama donor, a supporter of LGBT rights, etc.—it’s unlikely that he actually intended to come off as a sexist boor who was belittling women. Indeed, it’s possible he intended quite the opposite–but as any grad student in literary theory could tell you, artistic intention isn’t that important. His shtick was fundamentally confusing: What kind of comedy was the boob song–juvenile and sexist mockery, or institutional parody? Or both at once? And who was its intended target? Worst of all, the confusion evidently struck many viewers, especially women, as profoundly unfunny.

O’Hehir knows what “any grad student in literary theory could tell you”—but he can’t quite figure out “what kind of comedy” the boob song actually was. Was it meant as institutional parody? O’Hehir isn’t sure. That said, O’Hehir thinks “it’s unlikely that MacFarlane actually intended to come off as a sexist boor who was belittling women.” He reaches that judgment after “considering what we know about MacFarlane’s politics”–specifically, after considering the fact that he supported Obama.

Really? How about considering what we know about MacFarlane’s comedy? Considering that, we would say it was highly likely that he would come off as a fellow who was belittling women, whatever he might have intended. O’Hehir researches 2500 years of philosophy but he apparently forgot to research MacFarlane’s career, deciding instead that he should examine the gentleman's voting record.

MacFarlane voted for Obama! And as we know, the sexist boors are all in the other tribe!

This is one of the least comprehending pieces we’ve ever read on any topic. Assuming O’Hehir is playing it straight and not simply puffing a powerful source, it represents a valuable document—a record of the complete inability of some men to comprehend sexual politics. Throughout the piece, O’Hehir never seems able to understand where this flap came from or what it concerned. At one point, he even says this:

O’HEHIR: It’s safe to assume the producers knew there might be some backlash against MacFarlane, given that every aspect of this obsessively dissected and psychoanalyzed media spectacle is guaranteed to provoke outrage from someone, somewhere. But no one could’ve been prepared for the tide of collective anger–largely although not exclusively female–that began to swell within the first minutes of last Sunday’s broadcast, and then crashed onto the beach the next morning in some of the most damning reviews of recent Oscar history.

Incredible, isn’t it? According to O’Hehir, no one could have predicted that MacFarlane’s “boob song” would produce that tide of anger! In fact, anyone with 2 IQ points to rub together could and would have foreseen that reaction—unless he’s completely unable to grasp the shape of sexual politics.

O’Hehir’s piece goes on and on; it never gets any less uncomprehending. (Don’t miss the part where he ruminates about the way “German audiences reportedly howled with laughter at newsreels of Nazi soldiers compelling rabbis to clean latrines with their beards.”) In fairness, O’Hehir has hardly been the only color-blind soul in the wake of MacFarlane’s performance. We’ll probably do one more post on this topic, a post which will examine the thinking of some major names in the comedy business and the great folk at The Onion, where someone decided to drop a C-bomb on a named 9-year-old child. (Penn Jillette ardently told Piers Morgan that they shouldn't have apologized for that.)

But good God! O’Hehir’s piece is an absolute keeper. It displays the way some people, even including some men, simply can’t comprehend the problem that arises when sexual insults are directed at women on worldwide TV—in this case, at named individual women who are attending their industry’s biggest annual event. For a display of total incomprehension, marvel at the following passage, in which O’Hehir refers to two aggressive critics of MacFarlane’s numb-nutted performance:

O’HEHIR: In an Op-Ed for the Advocate, Victoria A. Brownworth argues that critics like Lauzen and Davidson missed the entire point of “We Saw Your Boobs,” which was that, “in Hollywood, women—even when playing victims of violent crime—are reduced to the sum of their body parts, not the sum of their movie parts. But a man singing about ‘boobs’ just had to be bad and sexist and wrong. There couldn’t have been a satirical point being made.”

Brownworth is right that some Oscar viewers leapt right over the visible evidence toward ready conclusions–but in fact, I’m not inclined to believe that MacFarlane was actually making a stealth-feminist argument or that he was intentionally serving as hit man for Hollywood’s ruling male oligarchy. Furthermore, it doesn’t much matter, and the outraged response of so many people cannot simply be ascribed to humorlessness or incomprehension. In formal terms, the boob song was actually a different kind of humor entirely: It was a meta-joke, a parody of a bad Oscar musical number rooted in the comedy of incongruity, which is probably the most familiar variety. This too goes back to Aristotle, who observes that you can always get a laugh by setting up a conventional expectation and then delivering a twist.

This too goes back to Aristotle. But then, so does everything else.

Good God. If O’Hehir is right, Brownworth thought MacFarlane was trying to make a satirical point about the way women in Hollywood “are reduced to the sum of their body parts” when they appear in a movie. Needless to say, this absurd interpretation sends O’Hehir back to his encyclopedia, although he himself is “not inclined to believe that MacFarlane was actually making a stealth-feminist argument.”

That said, O’Hehir is able to see the actual nature of MacFarlane’s now-famous song. “In formal terms,” O’Hehir says, the boob song “was a meta-joke, a parody of a bad Oscar musical number rooted in the comedy of incongruity.”

Go ahead. Read O’Hehir’s full piece. As you do, ask yourself a powerful question:

Is democracy still possible in the Internet era? Can we the people think for ourselves in any manner at all? Or must we find a way to return to an earlier age, in which we boobs were handed a limited set of ideas by a ruling press corps elite?

Not too long ago, we were handed a very small set of ideas by Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley. Whatever their limitations, Cronkite and Brinkley weren’t bat-shit crazy, although they may have secretly known that we the people are.

Almost all politicians know that. O’Hehir has made this secret knowledge accessible to one and all.

Before and after: You be the judge:

In the days of Walter and David, we were handed Eliot's "Love Song." It starts in Italian! Click this.

In these days of fuller democratization, we get handed MacFarlane's "boob song." Can our new processes last?

The basic shortcoming of Creeping Kleinism!

SATURDAY, MARCH 2, 2013

It’s right there in today’s Post: The basic problem with Ezra Kleinism is on display in this morning’s Post.

It’s on display in Klein's page 2 column. The headline says this, and the key word is “smart:”

“Some smart alternatives to brain-dead sequestration.”

Plainly, Klein is routinely presented as part of journalism’s Smart New Breed. On The One True Liberal Channel, viewers are often fed this hook, along with the pledge that his highly intelligent segments won’t last more than two minutes.

At the Washington Post, Klein and his underbloggers post each day at his site, which is called WonkBlog. This is a familiar, self-flattering part of modern pseudo-liberalism: We present ourselves as the wonks, the nerds, the very smart people. On the TV machine thingy, Rachel Maddow executes his humblebrag with great skill.

Having said that, there’s nothing wrong with presenting material which is smart. But is today’s column by Klein really smart? On balance, we’d have to say it isn’t.

Here’s why:

Ezra’s basic premise is simple: Deficit reduction of the past few years has been uniformly dumb:

KLEIN (3/2/13): What sequestration proves is that the U.S. government is dumb. There have been three major deficit-reduction packages in the past three years. The first passed in 2011 and set limits on discretionary spending over the next decade. Next came the tax increases in January's "fiscal cliff" deal, by which part of the tax code reverted to its state before the administration of President George W. Bush. Now we have sequestration, with automatic, across-the-board cuts.

The total deficit reduction in these three policies is well over $3 trillion, which gets close to stabilizing our debt-to-gross- domestic-product ratio for the next decade (although not thereafter). What all these policies have in common is that they're brain-dead ways to reduce the deficit.

A large amount of deficit reduction has been achieved, Ezra says. But all these three of these policies have been brain-dead, dumb.

To show us what smart reduction looks like, Ezra discusses a recent project. Fifteen “experts” were asked for policy proposals which would reduce future deficits. These experts accepted this Greenstone Challenge.

As Ezra describes this smart-sounding project, a gigantic problem already looms, although he doesn’t say so:

KLEIN (continuing directly): Michael Greenstone, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Hamilton Project, anticipated that. So about six months ago, he approached 15 experts and asked them for their best policy proposals, which had to meet two conditions. First, they had to reduce the budget deficit. Second, they had to have "broader positive effects," such as helping the economy, increasing government efficiency, slowing global warming—that sort of thing. "The point is we can do good for the budget and do good for the longer-run American economy," Greenstone said.

The result is "15 Ways to Rethink the Federal Budget," a 110-page guidebook on how to reduce the deficit.

Greenstone wanted policies which would reduce the deficit and produce “broader positive effects.” For example, the proposals might slow global warming.

Can you spot the problem that’s lurking there? There’s no sign that Ezra does.

What’s the problem with this contest? For whatever reason, global warming is a gigantic rally-killer within our current politics. Policies designed to reduce global warming run smack-dab into our tribal political culture, in which large percentages of the public believe that human-caused global warming is some sort of hoax.

Here at THE HOWLER, we might think it’s “smart” to find ways to slow future warming. But when politicians propose such a goal, our politics quickly breaks down.

Ezra’s readers aren’t warned about that. In his next six paragraphs, Ezra describes six of the “smart” proposals which emerged from The Greenstone Challenge; this burns roughly half his column.

You can peruse those proposals yourself. You may well regard those proposals as “smart.” But this is the way this part of Ezra's column starts:

“Perhaps the best and most obvious idea is a carbon tax.”

This may seem like the best idea to you, to me or to Ezra. But within our current tribal politics, this is one of the “best and most obvious” ways to craft a proposal which simply can’t pass. Meanwhile, we’ll ask you to notice something else about five of the six smart proposals:

According to Ezra, those five proposals, all together, would produce about $360 billion of deficit reduction. How “smart” is it to compare these ideas to the allegedly dumber policies which have produced almost ten times as much reduction?

Absent further explanation, that doesn’t strike us as especially smart. Meanwhile, here is the one proposal which does produce a large amount of reduction:

KLEIN: Diane Lim, the chief economist at the Pew Charitable Trusts, proposes converting the various deductions in the tax code to 15 percent, nonrefundable tax credits. The resulting tax code would be simpler and much more progressive. Oh, and it would raise $2.7 trillion, much of which we could use to lower marginal tax rates.

Most Post readers won’t understand the term “15 percent, nonrefundable tax credits.” But the larger problem lies is a different phrase: “much more progressive.”

If Lim’s proposal were explained more fully, we might think it’s a good idea. But then, we are inclined to think that income inequality is massively out of whack in our current society.

We might think that Lim’s proposal is “smart” in that one basic sense. But within our political system, proposals for a “much more progressive” tax code will run headfirst into screaming fang-toothed opposition. Plutocrat forces will swing into action; a wide array of zombie facts will march onto the field of battle. Confusion, misdirection and intellectual chaos will soon be observed all aound.

People reading Klein’s new column may think they’re reading something that’s smart. In a limited sense, that is true.

But in a much larger sense, they are being completely shielded from the way our politics works. Anyone can generate “smart” ideas if they are allowed to imagine a world where they are their friends are king.

For better or for worse, we don’t live in that world. Meanwhile, Ezra’s column completely avoids the fundamental problem with our political culture—the real set of problems which must be addressed before we can get any “smarter.”

What is the problem that Ezra skips past? He skips past the basic building-blocks of the American discourse. According to the physicists, the elementary particles of matter include quarks, leptons, bosons and gluons.

Somewhat similarly, the building blocks of our public discourse are novels, tribalized stories and scripts, along with two basic kinds of facts—zombie and forbidden. Those building blocks shape all our discussions. They powerfully undermine many things you or we might regard as “smart.”

The "experts" at Pew don't dirty their hands, or risk their good names, discussing our broken political culture or the actual shape of our ludicrous discourse. Meanwhile, in today’s column, Ezra piddles around in a sandbox where those elementary forces and building-blocks haven’t yet been discovered.

We sometimes wonder why people read WonkBlog. To the extent that its information is accurate, it will typically lie disconnected from the actual world. Out in that unfortunate realm, tribal fright tales and zombie facts make our discourse astoundingly dumb—and the fifteen giants Greenstone challenged have never said one word about this.

The imperfect minds of our warring tribes are clogged with disinformation. Beyond that, we have very few forums through which members of our tribe can speak to members of theirs. (On The One True Channel, they’re constantly building very high walls to keep the two tribes apart.) Our economic “experts” have rarely made any attempt to address this blindingly obvious cultural problem. Neither have the nation’s “logicians,” whose offices can be found in the Philosophy buildings.

In fairness, these professors may not have time to attempt such tasks, since they’re on vacation in France.

Klein’s column may seem very smart; it certainly poses as same. In our view, it will only seem smart if Post readers are too dumb to understand the shape of our world.

How smart are the folk at the Washington Post: To read Klein’s column, just click here. For unknown reasons, that is the only version of the column we can find on-line. As of 11 this morning, it was pretty much MIA at the on-line Washington Post.

In the hard-copy Post, it topped page 2. On-line, it's missing in action. In fairness, the Post did link us to this report, a rumination on the way Obama confused Star Trek with Star Wars.

The “experts” avoid discussing the culture which persistently hands us such crap. But that culture, the culture the experts avoid, makes this “smart” column quite pointless.

What we found in The Feminine Mystique!

FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013

Three passages from Quindlen: On Monday, we disembarked from Amtrak, blown away by Betty Friedan’s famous text, The Feminine Mystique.

Our copy of the book includes an Introduction by Anna Quindlen. It was written in 2001, aimed at the impending fortieth anniversary of Friedan’s book.

Let’s use three chunks from Quindlen’s text to help praise that brilliant book.

As she starts, Quindlen describes her housewife mother reading the book at the kitchen table in 1964. Many suburban housewives were reading Friedan’s famous book at that time.

Quindlen imagines what her mother was thinking, painfully sketches her life:

QUINDLEN: “Who am I?” my mother must have been asking herself at the table in the kitchen, and with her millions of others who would pore over this painstakingly reported, fiercely opinionated book. My mother had everything s woman after World War Ii was told she could want, told by the magazines and the movies and the television commercials; a husband with a good job, five healthy children, a lovely home in the suburbs, a patio and a powder room. But in the drawer of her bureau she kept a small portfolio of the drawings she had done in high school, the pages growing yellower year by year. My bag lunches for school sometimes included a hard-boiled egg, and on its shell she would paint in watercolors, the face of a princess, a seaside scene. I cracked those eggs without thinking twice.

“Painstakingly reported, fiercely opinionated?” As we read Friedan’s book, we were deeply impressed by both phenomena. But as the book begins, in Chapter 1, it helps us imagine the lives of many women of the early 1960s (and beyond), women like Quindlen’s mother.

Quindlen’s portrait of her mother is especially painful to read. But Friedan’s discussion made us think of many women of that era. It made us wonder about our own mother; it made us think of the deeply troubled mother of someone who became a friend years later; it made us think of a friend from the 1960s whose marriage couldn’t survive the changes unloosed by Friedan’s book. It made us think of the young wife of a young high school teacher who was decent enough to give Friedan’s book to our own sister in 1963, just as she was finishing high school and heading off to college.

Friedan was writing about millions of women. In this next excerpt, Quindlen uses a word Friedan herself rarely employed:

QUINDLEN: What Friedan gave to the world was “the problem that has no name.” She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fit the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial. “If a woman had a problem in the 1950s and 1960s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself,” Friedan wrote, based on both her reporting and her own experience.

This was preposterous, she argued...

In Friedan’s first chapter, she frequently describes the “desperation” many suburban housewives were feeling—a “desperation” that had no name, felt by women who all assumed it reflected some problem unique to them. Friedan rarely used the word “depression,” but we kept thinking that this was the condition she was diagnosing in these unhappy lives.

Before we read Friedan’s book this weekend, we had no idea how deeply brilliant it was. A third take-away from Quindlen's text supplies us with two more key words:

QUINDLEN: In those forty years, The Feminine Mystique has sometimes been devalued. Friedan the author became inextricably intertwined with Friedan the public figure, the latter often identified with internecine squabbles with other feminist leaders and a combative public persona. In hindsight the shortcomings of the book become clear. Too much attention is paid to the role of institutions and publications in the reinforcement of female passivity, too little to the role of individual men who have enjoyed the services of a servant class and still resent its loss. Friedan’s own revisiting of the material in The Second Stage (1981) was not as rigorous or well-researched as The Feminine Mystique had been. While she attempted to make valid points about why some women have chosen to embrace childrearing and a domestic life, the revisionist message of this second book appeared to be an apologia for the ferocity of her first.

We can’t say we agree with the heart of that passage, but we hail it for its use of two words: “combative” and “ferocity.” Was Friedan combative in some way? If not, she never would have had the gumption to write such a great, street-fighting book, in which she announced herself to the world and said she can lick every man (and woman) in the house. The sheer ferocity of the book is part of what made it most startling: In Chapter 5, Friedan brutally takes out Sigmund Freud, then does the same for Margaret Mead in Chapter 6.

They were the giant, controlling intellectual figures of the age. According to Friedan's ferocious text, it was time for them to go.

Set aside the minor question of whether every word is right; we were amazed by the gumption involved in such an undertaking. And the passion of the author is evident on every page. You will rarely encounter a book whose author believes her case so strongly and can argue her case so well.

Good God, what an astonishing book! We’d seen the standard yapping complaints as the 50th anniversary drew near. Yapping-dog pundits will always perform that imitation of service. But Friedan, who knew about Quindlen’s mother, wrote a gigantic, brilliant text, one of the greatest texts we have ever encountered.

Ignore the yapping complaints you may have heard. This book is hugely worth reading—and it does seem modern in one key respect. The book describes a failing culture overwhelmed by faux experts and faux journalists. The problems have changed in the past fifty years, but the structure has seemed to endure.

Friedan’s complaint seems familiar. Friedan had to lick every man in the house because, in her account of the 1950s, all the experts and all the journalists had agreed that they would All Say The Same Things. Quindlen’s mother was one of the losers in this familiar but sorry social arrangement. Luckily, a brilliant and ferocious observer happened to come along.

That portrait of Quindlen’s mother hurts. That pain is found on every page of this angry, astonishing book.

Rachel takes the predictable dive!

FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013

Who ever heard of Bob Woodward: On Fox last night, the blind man was king. Sean Hannity started his ludicrous show with a long interview with Bob Woodward:

HANNITY (2/28/13): And welcome to Hannity!

Now in just a moment, I'll be joined by Bob Woodward for an exclusive interview about whether or not he feels he's being threatened by the Obama White House. But first, here is the back story...

The interview went on for two segments. Woodward finally disavowed the idea that he felt “threatened” by Gene Sperling. On CNN the previous night, he had let that representation stand.

But Woodward continued to shape-shift and cherry-pick his ludicrous story, and this made him a hero on Fox. At 10, Greta van Susteren opened her program with a segment on Woodward, including footage of his interview with Sean. And at 8 o’clock, Mr. O had opened his program with the same thrilling topic:

O’REILLY (2/28/13): The O’Reilly Factor from LA is on! Tonight:

WOODWARD (videotape): It was said very clearly: "You will regret doing this."

ANNOUNCER: Did the Obama administration threaten the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward over a story on the budget chaos? And now others are coming forward saying they were threatened too.

LANNY DAVIS (videotape): That exact thing happened to me and I haven't spoken of this before.

ANNOUNCER: We will get to the bottom of a growing controversy.

On Fox, the appalling Woodward was king. What occurred on The One Liberal Channel?

Good God! It was just as we warned you! Rachel Maddow took the predictable dive; she never mentioned Woodward at all! Neither did the fiery liberal Chris Hayes, who was guest-hosting for Lawrence.

Chris Matthews seems to have been completely repurposed, but he didn’t mention Woodward either. From 5 through 11, only one program on MSNBC so much as mentioned this topic.

Alone among hosts, Big Ed took Woodward on. In his opening segment, he was helped by Barney Frank. In his second segment, David Corn and Mike Tomasky commented on Woodward’s craziness. That said, Corn was rather soft on Woodward. He was much harder on Politico for running with the non-story.

Easy to be hard!

On Fox, Woodward was thoroughly pimped to the world. But on The One True Liberal Channel, Maddow and friends took a dive.

For the record, Maddow’s program last night was awful in every respect. She devoted one full segment to self-promotion, two full segments to surpassingly dumb political analysis. She closed with an utterly pointless segment about the problem of having two Popes.

But through all that, she never quite managed to mention the name “Bob Woodward.” Maddow is skillful at conning us rubes. But as we've told you many times, she will never name big names like that.

Dearest darlings, it just isn't done! Careers hang in the balance!

What a joke that program is! Maddow loves to invent various things “the Beltway media” are said to have said, at which point she shoots those invented statements down. From such bullshit, we get the impression that she's fighting quite hard on our side.

She isn’t. Rachel Maddow, a giant fraud, proved that again last night.

On Fox, they proved it all night long, pimping Woodward's tale to the world. In response, Rachel ran off in the woods.

Once she arrived there, she hid. How many times do we have to explain the way this scam-song works?

MAN AND MANDARIN: Who should you trust!

FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013

Part 4—Concerning that profile of Ezra: Should we liberals place our trust in our new generation of liberal journalists?

According to Megan McArdle, the answer is pretty much no. In a recent profile, McArdle described a rising class of elite young journalists who “really are very bright and hardworking”—but who may also be “prone to be conformist, risk averse, obedient, and good at echoing the opinions of authority.”

Does that describe our new liberal journalists? Consider that recent profile of Ezra Klein.

At age 28, Klein is one of the most successful of our new rising journalists. A few weeks ago, Julia Ioffe published this profile of Klein in the New Republic.

Plainly, Klein is very bright, in the sense of IQ and “verbal fluency.” Beyond that, he seems like a perfectly decent person; people have told us he is. That said, is there any chance that Klein’s background and princely position make him “prone to be conformist, risk averse, obedient, and good at echoing the opinions of authority?”

Sensible liberals will spend some time worrying about such matters. They’ll recall how the last generation of journalists turned out, the gruesome generation that gave us Sam and Cokie. (To recall the moment of their ultimate descent, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/27/13).

Ezra Klein is very bright; he seems like a decent person. That said, is there any chance that his background and his position make him “prone to” to the deficits McArdle listed?

Consider two parts of Ioffe’s profile. Along the way, consider the role that is played by Wonkblog, the web site Klein has wrought.

People like Klein have a great deal at stake in their daily efforts. Are there topics and insights he’s inclined to avoid as a way of protecting his future earnings and fame?

At one point, Ioffe made a passing remark which caught our attention. In this passage, she is describing Klein, who is now 28, during the Bush years:

IOFFE (2/12/13): He became part of a crew of bloggers, all of them young men, most of them still in college, who were essentially the liberal guerrilla underground during the Bush years: They were disgusted by Bush’s policies and disconnected from the enfeebled Democratic establishment. The mainstream media, which they felt had abetted both Al Gore’s defeat and Bush’s misadventure in Iraq, were particularly villainous in their eyes—little more than stenographers and scandal hounds.

“What the blogosphere did with newspaper column analysis is make fun of how horrible it was,” says David Weigel, Klein’s friend and fellow member of what came to be known as the Juicebox Mafia. “There were columnists who, even with all their access, which you assumed they had, were just completely lazy and misinformed. And that was the opposite of the blogosphere. The only way to succeed in the blogosphere was actually to shoot at the groin of whoever was bigger than you.” Almost everyone came in for derision: George Will, David Brooks, David Broder. The latter became synonymous with high-minded appeals for bipartisanship, or “High Broderism.” Klein and co. were far less interested in finding compromise than in their side winning.

We highlight the brief aside in which Ioffe says that Klein and associates felt that the mainstream press “abetted both Al Gore’s defeat and Bush’s misadventure in Iraq.” Question: Since Klein began attaining real stature, have you ever seen him advance that first key point?

In our experience, the answer is yes! Klein described the press corps’ war against Candidate Gore on one major occasion. Back in 2006, he did so right at the start of a cover story for The American Prospect.

For reasons which have gone unexplained, he never did so again.

Incredibly, Klein was just 21 or 22 when he wrote this accurate description of the press corps’ role in Campaign 2000. As he starts, he refers to a speech Gore gave in October 2005:

KLEIN (4/06): [Gore’s] address was the keynote for the We Media conference, held at the Associated Press headquarters in New York last October and attended by an audience that included both old media luminaries and new media innovators. In attendance were Tom Curley, president of the AP, Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, all leading lights of a media establishment that, five years earlier, had deputized itself judge, jury, and executioner for Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, spinning each day’s events to portray the stolid, capable vice president as a wild exaggerator, ideological chameleon, and total, unforgivable bore.

Say what? The “media establishment deputized itself judge, jury, and executioner for Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign?” These famous, influential news orgs were guilty of “spinning each day’s events to portray the stolid, capable vice president as a wild exaggerator, ideological chameleon, and total, unforgivable bore?”

Is that what the press corps did?

Did the press corps do those things? Given the narrow way that election was decided, this would rather plainly mean that the mainstream press corps decided the outcome of Campaign 2000—and quite plainly, that is what they did. But even in his interviews about this 2006 report, Klein never returned to that startling claim—the kind of claim which can’t be made by Serious People within the mainstream press corps.

Why did Klein suddenly swallow the apple? Why did he drop this remarkable theme? At the time, we offered a speculation:

Someone had taken this (very) young man aside and explained the facts of life. You simply can’t say things like that if you plan to succeed in the press corps!

Is that why Ezra Klein dropped this theme—dropped it like a rock? Like you, we have no idea. But when he dropped this startling theme, he joined the rest of the career liberal world in keeping us liberals barefoot and clueless. We weren’t allowed to hear the truth about news orgs like the New York Times, CBS, the AP.

If you want to climb as the mandarins do, you simply can’t discuss such topics. Such observations cannot be made—and Klein no longer makes them.

Without any question, Klein has successfully climbed. Did he decide to throw your interests away so he could get to the top? To this day, his type will not discuss the role the press corps has played in building the dominant themes and concepts which control the current political discourse.

We’re sorry, but that isn’t what WonkBlog does! WonkBlog just gives us information and facts!

We were struck by a second part of Ioffe’s profile. In the passage which follows, Klein acknowledges that, perfectly sensibly, he was nervous about being profiled.

We were struck by the reasons he listed:

IOFFE: I noted that the process of being profiled seemed to make him nervous. “Of course, it makes me nervous!” Klein exclaimed. “You know what we do, right?” (By “we,” he meant journalists.) “We take people and we take their stories away from them and refashion them into the format that will make the best article.” The New Republic, he noted, was especially guilty of making their profile subjects look bad, which he was worried would happen to him. “You seem great, but there’s no reason not to be careful,” he said, his frustration herniating through the professorial polish, his voice going tense. “I think journalists are completely irresponsible about how they use people and how they use quotes. All the time.”

“You’re a journalist, right?” I asked him.

“I am,” he agreed. “And I try to be responsible about it.” But by taking the things people told us and spinning them out of context, Klein said, we journalists undermined our own arguments for why people should go on the record with us.

“Do your colleagues here do this?” I asked him, gesturing to the newsroom around him.

“I think everybody that does campaign reporting does this,” he said curtly. “All the time.”

Fascinating! As in his report about Gore in 2006, Klein is perfectly right in these comments. His colleagues at the Washington Post are engaged in a constant process of taking the things people (i.e., candidates) say and spinning them out of context. To state the obvious, that's precisely the way his colleagues took down Gore.

The process hasn’t gigantically changed, although the uniformity of the press corps’ anti-Clinton loathing has reverted to an earlier paradigm. In the current model, various journalists and various news orgs can be found misquoting various candidates in various ways.

During the twenty months of Campaign 2000, the loathing and the misquoting were unanimous. All such conduct was aimed at Gore. Today, the press corps’ misconduct continues, but the targets are more diffuse.

Klein was right in what he said about the press corps’ misconduct. That said, you will rarely see him saying such things in the Washington Post or on TV. Like his benefactor, Rachel Maddow, Klein can almost never be found discussing the actual process by which misinformation is spread.

He doesn’t name the names of colleagues who spread all this bullshit around. Politely, he creates blizzards of information at WonkBlog, ignoring the fact that information plays almost no role in the ongoing discourse, ignoring the fact that it will never do so until the discourse is freed from the bogus narratives, scripts and novels which control all our discussions.

All information is destined to die until we blow up those novels and scripts. But doing so requires the naming of famous names, and our young climbers will rarely do that. Consider this additional chunk of Ioffe’s profile:

IOFFE: His disavowal of party is particularly conspicuous. Klein, who came up through the progressive media and is, according to public records, a registered Democrat, insists on portraying himself as someone driven purely by powerful, un-ideological currents of data. “I’m not afraid to tell people where I come down,” he told me that October night in the town car. “But it’s entirely possible for me to imagine a Republican president who is not irresponsible on policy. It could even be Mitt Romney, who governed more in the realm of a George H. W. Bush. And all of a sudden, a lot of people who think they agree with me on everything would find that they don’t.”

The columnist who he feels achieves this platonic evenhandedness best is The New York Times’s David Brooks. “In the course of a pretty short column, he is able to convey the other side’s positions back to them in a way they would recognize,” Klein says. The fact that Klein feels he has largely achieved this state is a major point of pride, and he says it makes his criticism of policy more weighty. What he didn’t mention was that, four years earlier, he wrote a blog post titled “The Pitfalls of Making David Brooks Your Guy.”

We don’t hate Brooks as some others do. In truth, we can’t say we hate him at all, nor do we plan to or want to. But should liberals be concerned by the fact that Klein has moved on from that earlier post?

In our view, yes—we should be concerned, although liberals should also check the fairness of Ioffe's work on this point. Similarly, we should be concerned by the fact that Klein will never, ever tell you how George W. Bush reached the White House. It’s abundantly clear that he knows the answer—but telling that truth isn’t done.

Are we noting some actual traits in Klein which ought to make liberals nervous? We can’t exactly tell you. But in her profile of the new mandarin class, McArdle told an ancient story, in which the Julien Sorels of the world (or the imperial Chinese mandarins) seek out the best ways to rise. In modern pseudo-journalism, the rewards are immense for the young men and women who manage to find their way to the top. Perhaps as a result, we have seen a steady stream of young super-achievers melt down as part of the chase. (The transcendently bogus Jonah Lehrer was only the latest to fall.)

Is Ezra Klein such a person? We don’t have the slightest idea. But people who care about the world should be suspicious of all our young rapid risers. When we read one part of Ioffe’s profile, we couldn’t help recalling a similar profile of the late Tim Russert, a colleague of Cokie and Sam:

IOFFE (2/12/13) “Ezra is an incredible operator,” says one prominent Washington editor. “He is always looking upward at things. You only have to watch him work a party. He moves right to the most important people there.” One friend saw Klein and his wife, New York Times reporter Annie Lowrey, at an event for last year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and noted that they spent most of the night talking to Gene Sperling, Obama’s economic adviser.

That was Ioffe, profiling Klein. Thirteen years earlier, this was USA Today’s Peter Johnson, profiling Russert:

JOHNSON (11/1/00): “I've never seen anyone work this town the way they did,” Washingtonian writer Chuck Conconi says of Russert and his wife, Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth, who live in Washington's tony Cleveland Park in a house that has a media pedigree: Previous owners include PBS' Charlie Rose, NBC's Tom Brokaw and New York Times columnist James Reston.

Conconi recalls a tale about Russert and Orth being spotted at a cheap hamburger joint in Georgetown after an exclusive party at Pamela Harriman's house after President Clinton's first election. "They are masters of the Washington social scene. They know you don't go to parties to eat or drink. You go there to work." The anecdote may be apocryphal, Conconi says, "but I can't think of a story that rings more true."

In those days, Russert made TV viewers like him by talking about the Buffalo Bills. Today, Klein good-naturedly takes the Ezra Klein Challenge. Message: Please like this man!

Is Ezra Klein a decent guy? As far as we know, he is. That said, McArdle’s piece offered many sound warnings to folk who don’t want to be seduced and abandoned by a new generation of journalist hustlers. Might we offer a stray observation?

How odd! Last night, Rachel Maddow didn’t even mention Bob Woodward’s recent disgraceful nonsense! (See our next post.) Neither did the fiery Chris Hayes, guest-hosting for Lawrence. Neither did the fully repurposed Chris Matthews.

On Fox last night, Bob Woodward was king. On The One True Liberal Channel, our fiery leaders played dumb.

To some, the dive Maddow took last night may seem strange. Seeing the merit in McArdle’s premise, we pretty much said it would happen.