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Why You Should Be Defending Ezra

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Several of you called “Inside Baseball” regarding my post a little bit ago that included Ezra Klein’s tweet that the Lieberman office is calling around asking about him, but failing to call him directly. That made me state “With Wittmann sniffing around Ezra, you have to wonder how long is before Hiatt has Klein working alongside Froomkin at the HuffPo.”

I really didn’t think this was that inside baseball, because I am sure most of you know what happened to Froomkin. Having said that, I guess many of you don’t realize what a perilous position a young guy like Ezra is currently in. Let me run it down (at least as I see it):

A few things about Lieberman’s office calling around asking about Ezra:

1.) Wittmann is a former Trotskyite, just like half the rest of the current neocon establishment. You know all that shit the wingnuts state about Saul Alinsky and the Obama WH following rules for radicals– it is nonsense, of course- but for the neocons, it isn’t. They follow those rules. See anyone who opposed the Iraq War, see anyone who stands up to the AIPAC lobby, etc. These guys would think nothing of exerting a little pressure, snuffing Ezra’s job, which would both silence a critic and send a message.

2.) Ezra is young and has, compared to his enemies, very few ties to the DC establishment. Sure, he has the TAPPED crowd and Podesta at ThinkProgress, but that is about it, and he is railing against some entrenched interests. Not only entrenched big money like the insurance and pharm and health industry, but the whole establishment. Wittmann has ties to the Christian Coalition, worked for John McCain, the DLC, Lieberman has deep ties, etc. The entire premise of his blog was to mock the “nutroots,” and our paths crossed politically as I was moving to the left and he was moving to the right.

3.) Ezra has already made enemies with folks that Lieberman and Wittman are tied to in one way or another. The goon squads at the Weekly Standard and Commentary hate him because Ezra has made remarks regarding Israel that fall out of line with what they want, Marty Peretz refers to Ezra as the “juice box mafia” and would not think twice about destroying him, Micky Kaus hates him because he wasn’t invited to the Journolist and even has a tag for the juicebox mafia, and I wouldn’t be shocked to hear them step up the rhetoric in the next couple of weeks, calling him a self-hating Jew, etc.

4.) He has no left flank to defend him. The idiot purists in the progressive wing have been savaging him daily on their blogs. Hell, we’ve all read the “progressive” blogs call him the “”>village scribe” or accused him of going native on a daily basis, and others have been launching similar attacks at him for months.

When you put it all together, what Ezra is doing takes balls. You may not agree with him all the time, but he has shown more nuts in a few months than 99% of the people who occupy positions in our media. I’ll quite frankly be shocked to see him there for more than a few more months. He is making all the right enemies, yet the folks who should be his friends are too stupid to support him. His dust up with Charlie Lane today was another example of the kind of thing we should all be standing up and cheering. That took balls.

You can count me pretty solidly in the pro-Ezra Klein camp.

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Right on Schedule

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Me, yesterday:

And if you ditch the compromise and the public option, they will find something else to grandstand about. For Nelson, he’ll be back to abortion. Who knows what Lieberman will start whining about, but I am sure Marshall Wittman is, as we speak, cooking up some fatuous bullshit.

CNN, today:

Wittmann acknowledged Monday that Lieberman, as the vice presidential candidate in 2000, had campaigned then for expanding Medicare.

“This is nine years later, and we have a huge national deficit and a program [Medicare] that analysts indicate is in dire fiscal straits in 2009,” Wittmann said. “If anyone believes that the situation has not changed, they also believe that Tiger Woods is not a controversial figure at this moment.”

Wittmann, like Lieberman, never feels constrained by the truth, because otherwise he would mention that Lieberman was in favor of the medicare buy-in three months ago:

“I was very focused on a group that’s post-50, or maybe post-55,” Lieberman explained to the Connecticut Post. “People who have retired early, or unfortunately, been laid off early, who lose their health insurance or are too young to qualify for Medicare. And what I was proposing is that they have an option to buy into Medicare on the premise that that would be less expensive.”

And while we are at it, this was funny:

Lieberman’s office is welcome to call *me* as opposed to, say, calling people about me. Courage!

Ahh, that famous Bull Moose quote: “Whisper quietly behind people’s backs while you stick it in them.” With Wittmann sniffing around Ezra, you have to wonder how long is before Hiatt has Klein working alongside Froomkin at the HuffPo.

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America hater explains everything

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Notorious P.A.T. points me to Noam Chomsky’s (spot-on, IMHO) to answer to the question I asked about Niebuhr:

You almost never find anyone, whether it’s in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, ‘I’m really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.’

Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called ‘the theologian of the establishment’. And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it’s what you do if you’re an intellectual). But, what it came down to is that, ‘Even if you try to do good, evil’s going to come out of it; that’s the paradox of grace’. And that’s wonderful for war criminals. ‘We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.’ And it’s influential. So, I don’t think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they’re doing, they’ll say: ‘We’re trying to preserve the peace of the world.’ People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice’, and so on.

I’d like to add that, whatever one thinks of Burke and Niebuhr and the rest, the question isn’t what their philosophy is really like, were they great thinkers, etc. The question is what (possibly dumbed-down) aspect of their philosophy is justifying whatever kookie thing David Brooks thinks the country should do.

It’s the same with religion — I read the New Testament once and I still don’t see evidence the Baby Jesus hates teh ghey so much.

Update. To be clear, I’m not seconding Chomsky’s claims about what Niebuhr actually says, to the extent that he’s making such claims (I can’t tell for sure if he is). I’m just saying that, based on what I have read about how conservative thinkers use Niebuhr, Chomsky is describing their reasoning very well.

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We are ruled by sociopaths

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Matt Yglesias writes:

The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.

A sociopath is often defined as “a person, as a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.” (This is what I found online and what I have always thought the definition was, roughIy — I realize there are more clinical definitions, but I know nothing about clinical psychology, maybe someone can help me out with this.)

I’m glad to see that this word is starting to get used more and more — not long ago, for example, Lindsay Beyerstein accurately described one of Slate’s new hires (a woman who had written books titled “How to Dump a Friend” and “Our Mutual Friend: how to steal friends and influence people”) as a sociopath.

To me, anyone who would start a war for no reason and show no remorse when it went terribly wrong is a sociopath. Anyone who would not only torture but then try to use support for torture as a political wedge issue is a sociopath. Anyone who would hold the health of millions of Americans hostage so that he could get more face-time on “Meet the Press” is a sociopath.

I believe that the biggest question about our society is why it is that so many sociopaths rise to positions of power and influence. Are all societies this way or is there something special about the way ours is structured right now?

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Just a Matter of Principle

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This is not surprising:

More than 80 percent of Democrats say they believe Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn) should be stripped of his powerful chairmanship in the Senate if he ends up supporting a Republican filibuster of health care reform, according to a new poll.

The liberal action groups Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America commissioned a survey several days ago, in which they asked more than 800 voters whether Lieberman’s position on health care should affect his status as head of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Eighty-one percent of Democrats said they would like to see the senator’s chairmanship — which he was allowed to keep despite campaigning for Sen. John McCain in 2008 — taken away should he sustain a filibuster. Only 10 percent of Democrats said there should be no punishment. Even fewer (nine percent) said they had yet to make up their minds, underscoring just how divisive Lieberman is within the party.

Here is the thing- Joe isn’t even a Democrat. If you can’t summon the nerve to punish an outsider who is continuously giving you and your agenda the shaft, you might as well kiss off any notion of party disciple ever. Even better, if you get rid of Holy Joe, you are down to 59 votes, which means the jackass Republicans can’t just sit around and say “Hey- you have the votes, why do you need us?” You might even muster some public support for doing something about the filibuster.

The first thing that has to change in regards to the filibuster, btw, is that people should actually have to filibuster. The status quo is unacceptable.

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Defining Galt’s Gulch

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Krugman doesn’t realize it, but he just defined Galt’s Gulch:

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

It is a magical place where global warming solves itself, the only thing health care reform needs is more deregulation, if the government would just get out of the way, Wall Street would self correct, and you get to eat Freedom Fries with every meal and never gain weight.

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