Ezra Klein, who just began working for the Washington Post, is 55 years younger than David Broder. That means he’ll be David Broder’s current age in 2064, assuming that we aren’t destroyed in a giant interstellar war before then.
(h/t swampland commenter hellslittlestangel)
kid bitzer
this man, I say, having observed that Xerxes wept, asked as follows: “O king, how far different from one another are the things which thou hast done now and a short while before now! for having pronounced thyself a happy man, thou art now shedding tears.”
And Xerxes said: “Yea, for after I had reckoned up the host of mine armies, it came into my mind to feel pity at the thought how brief was the whole life of man, seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive when a hundred years have gone by, and that in a mere fifty, a promising blogger will have turned into a pompous wanking villager.”
AhabTRuler
@kid bitzer: Wait, I don’t have my blogging press guide (wait, my pressing blog guide? My guiding press blog? Blog press! Dunno?), I thought Klein was already a pompous wanker. I can’t keep up with the non-conventional CW!?
DougJ
Already? What a prodigy. Personally, I like his blogging a great deal and wish I were enough of a policy wonk to appreciate it more.
Comrade Darkness
It won’t be a war; it will be to clear a path for the expressway.
That said, I’m surprised Broder’s officemates are bothered by the reek of formaldehyde drifting from his office.
AhabTRuler
@DougJ: No, I am semi-serious. I can never remember who is trashing whom or who has sold out, and during which week. I actually like it to a certain extent, it keeps me equally suspicious of everybody.
Sort of a hazy, paranoid theory of press/blog interpretation. I mostly stay around here for teh kittehs and to see you pile on the WaPo. ;-) Oh and the music video wars and the food too.
Laura W
Watch how I stay on topic here:
I think I strongly favor value ($12 max) wines from Spain to those from Italy. At least in terms of what my local S. Asheville wine merchants have been suggesting, based on what they think they know of my palate. I do not think they are listening to my palate at all. I need a Palate Whisperer.
Bill E Pilgrim
If a man isn’t a liberal when he’s young then he has no heart, and if he’s not a dribbling Beltwinger “centrist” when he’s older, then he never moved to Washington.
I can’t remember who said that.
O/T there seems to be another “Rush apology watch”, with Rep Tom Price of Georgia, and I just realized what this all makes me think of: the Twilight Zone episode where the kid has all the power and everyone goes around saying “Yes Timmy, it’s…. good! that you put the bad man in the cornfield… ” as they all tiptoe around wishing they had the spine to do something about it.
Booger
Okay, two things:
1. He may end up a pompous wanker, but he’ll be our pompous wanker.
2. If you’re going to accellerate a wine to approximately the speed of light, why go beyond box wine? Just for the sheer snobbery of it? I mean, who can really tell the difference at those speeds, anyway?
That is all.
MikeJ
Metropolitan Market has an $8.99 Jumilla that I lurve.
geg6
Ezra is a total policy geek and I, a Deist, have actually been…well…praying that the WaPo doesn’t infect him with Broderism. I adore Ezra. And the fact that’s he’s a sweet, veeeery good looking young thing on top of the policy geekiness is just icing on the cake. MattY used to be my policy geek crush but once I read Ezra? That crush was so yesterday. Seriously though, I find his stuff on health, food and agriculture (plus Top Chef fandom!), and transportation policies some of the absolute best around. Was it Digby that discovered him? I think so, but could be wrong.
jake 4 that 1
So are some piles of dirt.
JL
@AhabTRuler: I like Ezra and it’s nice that his talents have been recognized. Greg Sargent’s The Plum Tree is informative also and loosely connected to the Post.
AhabTRuler
@JL: Good to know. Of course I will forget that too and take his work on a case-by-case basis, but between you and DougJ, maybe something will stick.
I still want my Bloggy Guiding Press, tho.
geg6
JL: Ditto on Greg Sargent.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Booger:
Two words that shouldn’t be allowed near each other.
Once years ago I was teaching English and read my students a story in the Herald Tribune about how a rich diner in a swank NY City restaurant asked for a bottle of Mouton Rothschild to be made into a sangria. The waiter suggested perhaps a more modest wine but the guy said that no, he wanted “a GOOD sangria”.
One of my French students immediately said “That’s it. I don’t want to learn English anymore”.
He was kidding. Though I don’t remember if he actually came back.
Josh Hueco
Or, five whole feet of slippage by the San Andreas Fault.
Laura W
@Booger:
And THAT is exactly WHY I failed out of astrophysicist school!
That and my total lack of spatial awareness pretty much doom me to a lifetime of drinking mediocre wine from bottles in search of the “Perfect 10”, $10 bottle, and blathering endlessly on so-called political blogs.
Sucks.
MikeJ: As they demand: “Link Please!!”
geg6: I saw Ezra on Rachel, was it?, last week and I had the “Oooooooooo! He’s Kyooooooot” Reaction. I felt like a sexist. But an appreciative sexist.
chuck
A bottle of wine travelling at .99c has an effective mass of about 400 lbs.
Kind of heavy on the palette.
demkat620
I love the idea of a real health care policy wonk at the Post. I am glad to see that for a change the Post didn’t grab a hack.
Congrats Ezra and good luck!
Gordon, The Big Express Engine
@Bill E Pilgrim: Good article in the May 18th New Yorker about Fred Franzia and his under $10 wine empire in California. Two-buck (up)chuck indeed!
JL
@chuck: I bought a trader joe’s brand cabernet sauvignon for $4.99 and a friend said the trick to cheap wine is to pour it in a glass and let it sit for awhile or pour it back and forth between two glasses. I think that it worked because after the third glass it tasted fine.
MobiusKlein
Well, if he was a botany blogger, especially those fighting invasive exotics, would he be a Pampas Wonker, rather than a Pompous Wanker?
Old Gringo
Falsely attributed to Winston Churchill.
“Conservative by the time you’re 35”
“If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” There is no record of anyone hearing Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University makes this comment: “Surely Churchill can’t have used the words attributed to him. He’d been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?”
Calouste
@Old Gringo:
I always have a laugh when I see a conservative quoting that, or probably see them using any Churchill quote in general. The man is a bit too complex for the average conservative mind understand or apparently even know properly.
KCinDC
Wow, that’s more than the 52 years between Daniel Schorr and the person who substituted for him one Saturday in perhaps the lowest point in the history of NPR’s Morning Edition, Jonah Goldberg.
Third Eye Open
OT, but when is anything really ON-topic around here?
I am a social scientist, so I know very little about the ins-and-outs of lawyerly-lawyering, but could we get a bit of discussion going about the finer points of what the legal responsibilities of OLC lawyers were, and what threshold needs to be crossed before their actions become akin to either conspiracy or plain, ole-fashioned stupidity?
Can we start here?
Martin
I’ll play:
An average sedan with a full tank of gas has similar potential energy as a stick of dynamite. Next time you see your 16 year-old neighbor rocketing down the street, just imagine them holding a stick of dynamite and a lighter and consider how safe you would feel.
Additionally, approximately 6% of all humans that have ever lived are still alive today.
El Cid
I bet it takes him longer than it took for George Will to start bitching about people wearing those consarn’d dungarees.
Keith G
@geg6: Don’t know about Digby, but I began reading Ezra after he started on Panagon (back in 04?). God I’m getter so older.
Anyway, he can get a bit goofy occasionally – can’t we all, but I really appreciate his following of various healthcare issues.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Gordon, The Big Express Engine:
I’ll have to check it out.
In return, I actually just found that article in the Herald Tribune, amazingly.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/03/dining/a-sommelier-s-little-secret-the-microwave.html?scp=1&sq=microwave wine&st=cse&pagewanted=all
(sorry “external link” didn’t seem to work for me)
It was mainly about the US trend of microwaving wine. It was also from 1999, even more amazingly.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a $500 sangria.
Old Gringo
@Calouste
Wingnuts are notorious for false attributions or just out and out fabrications of alleged “quotations” of famous people, usually Founders and Framers. I heard Phil Gramm do it recently in some congressional testimony and the case of David Barton’s false quotations being read into the congressional record vis a vis the false Christian Nation myth is well known.
Jim DeMint “quotes” Jefferson:
“Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have.”
You’d have to be an idiot – or Ron Paul – to believe Jefferson ever spoke or wrote in that fashion or style.
But that’s one of the downsides to the intertubes. Burke never said “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’ (or words to that effect)” and Norman Thomas never said:
But Ronald Reagan was fond of “quoting” it anyway and attributing it to him.
MikeJ
I was afraid you’d ask. I can’t remember the name but I could walk to the bottle in the store blindfolded. I’ll make a note next time I’m there, but in the meantime, if you haven’t had wines from that region, try one. They’re great bargains.
andrea
I thought it was Joe Klein who was the pompous wanker. Ezra’s the cutehead with the spicy brain. Nevermind I’m old enough to be his mother.
Laura W
@MikeJ: Well, apparently it is Spain’s Comeback Region!
I’m pretty hung up on Garnacha lately. Hopefully I can find some in these here parts of Appalachia.
jnfr
Ezra was with Jesse at Pandagon I believe, before striking out on his own.
Turgidson
Ha, Broder went to the same high school as my dad. I’ll have to give him a hard time about that.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Booger: @<a
Any wine accelerated past the rate of about two bottles per evening expands the universe to the point where you can’t find your apartment. It’s just a matter of how good it tastes along the way I guess.
sloan
Who are we kidding? Broder will still be there in 2064.
GregB
Fun fact: David First column was written on papyrus scroll.
-G
geg6
Keith G and jnfr: That’s it! Pandagon, not Digby. Gawd, was that already five years ago? No wonder I couldn’t remember. Man, I’m old. Sadly, that makes me waaaay too old for cutie patootie policy wonk Ezra Klein.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
I reckon you’re confusing our man Ezra with Joe Klein, of Time Magazine, and (initially anonymous) author of Primary Colors.
eemom
Ezra strikes me as a smart and studious young fellow. I liked it when he stood up to Jane Hamsher’s fatwa against him on the Social Security issue.
His weirdly over-the-top praise when Doughtwat was tapped by the NYT, not so much. But maybe that’s a “solidarity among young proteges” type thing.
DougJ
No contest. The Spanish ones are *much* better.
My next wine blogging adventure will involve Italian wine, though, specifically Morellino di Scansano (I’ll in Pisa for two weeks starting in one week).
Laura W
@DougJ: Seems like we moved Wine Chat into the hockey thread.
Naturally.
Edit: How come you get to go to Europe and travel so much?
Dennis-SGMM
OT: The three Clint Eastwood Man With No Name movies; “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More,” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” are being sold as a set at Costco for a whole $16.99. The set is being put out by MGM and each DVD has the letterbox version on one side and the full screen (Yech!) on the other.
That’s a ton of squinty-eyed, gratuitous violence for seventeen bucks.
Farley
Seeing how Broder’s birthday is September 11th, perhaps I will send to him the Awesome-O 4000.
Laura W
@Dennis-SGMM:
Do you have ANY idea how much GREAT Spanish wine you could get for that same seventeen bucks, Dennis?
Left Coast Tom
So you’re thinking Jenna Bush will be elected President, and appoint Liz Cheney as her VP, just as Zefram Cochrane invents warp drive?
Johnny Pez
I thought we were expecting to be exterminated by our own robot slaves.
DougJ
It’s mostly for work. There are more Europeans in my area than Americans.
Xenos
So, while we are on the subject, any indication that Warner Brothers has finished the script and settled on a director for Forge of God?
Yglesias is young enough to be one of the people saved by the robot spiders and sent out for revenge… he could mix it up with the snake people, solve the mystery of the dead dinosaur mission, and then nuke the glowing staircase civilization…
On second thought, it sounds like a silly idea for a movie.
Martin
Sounds like something Sarah Palin would describe as ‘historical.’
gwangung
Isn’t that supposed to be a UTOPIAN future?
Cyrus
The question is, are they religious, or do they have endoskeletons?
burnspbesq
@Dennis-SGMM:
It’s good that I didn’t read this before Costco closed, for I still have to prep for a meeting tomorrow. However, I will go right by my local Costco on the way home from said meeting. And as soon as I post this, I am checking to make sure that my Costco membership card is in my wallet.
Thanks for the heads-up.
TenguPhule
It will be once we strap them on it and fire them at the Klingons.
asiangrrlMN
I like Ezra, even though I don’t find him particularly cute. I always find it amusing when people hurl, “Sell out” at someone who goes to work for a corporation or a music act that makes it big. I wish him well in his new post.
@Left Coast Tom: If either Bush twin becomes prez, or their heinous cousin, George P. Bush and Liz Cheney becomes VP, then I will follow Tina Fey’s lead and leave the planet.
Hob
[email protected], there’s been no news on that for about a year. If Greg Bear knows anything, he’s not telling.
pdbuttons
trig baby is lord
be a christian/ pray for the ford….
outruns four horses
ItAintEazy
jnfr:
Well, before Jesse made him a blog partner, he used to post on the sadly departed NotGeniuses.com which fits because, as he admitted before, he was a bit of a goof-off before entering college. Almost didn’t get into a UC school if not for his standardized test scores.
Now, back to polishing my shaking cane for all those no-good kids on my lawn.