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You are here: Home / Absence of empathy

Absence of empathy

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Ezra Klein edges ever closer to being Froomkined:

For Robert Samuelson, the fact that the Affordable Care Act is fully paid for and in fact reduces the deficit isn’t good enough. “If the administration has $1 trillion or so of spending cuts and tax increases over a decade, all these monies should first cover existing deficits — not finance new spending,” he writes. “Obama’s behavior resembles a highly indebted family’s taking an expensive round-the-world trip because it claims to have found ways to pay for it. It’s self-indulgent and reckless.”

[….]

And before you think this is all about Samuelson, consider that Charles Krauthammer calls coverage “candy.” There’s an absence of empathy here that borders on a clinical disorder.

Samuelson, Krauthammer, and most of the rest of the high-profile pundits do indeed suffer from a clinical disorder. Ain’t no border neither.

Klein will eventually be fired for writing things like this.

Reader Interactions

80Comments

  1. 1.

    El Cid

    The punditariat, at root, hate ordinary struggling folk, love being part of an insider elite, and prefer to have their “real” Americans of the entertaining clown show variety which they imaginarily visit like bungee-jumping anthropologists.

  2. 2.

    EFroh

    Klein will eventually be fired for writing things like this.

    I agree, unfortunately. I think maybe he knows, so he’s trying to make his argument as forcefully as he can given the limited time he has.

    I also agree that it’s bizarre at the almost sociopathic lack of empathy that many pundits suffer from. It’s like health problems don’t really exist unless they themselves suffer from them personally.

  3. 3.

    Mark S.

    Klein will eventually be fired for writing things like this.

    You betcha. The rule among respectable Village pundits is that, even if you disagree, everyone is arguing in good faith and everyone wants what’s best for the country.

  4. 4.

    EFroh

    Oops. That should have been “I also agree that the almost sociopathic lack of empathy that many pundits exhibit is bizarre.” Not enough sleep, sorry.

  5. 5.

    danimal

    He may get fired for this someday, but dammit, the kids’ got smarts and he’s retained his soul. Samuelson is an essential part of the “10 worst WaPo columnists” list, and Krauthammer has earned his own circle of hell for the evil he spews.

  7. 7.

    beltane

    @El Cid: The punditry likes to think of all ordinary Americans as being as ugly, ignorant and bigoted as the teabaggers. They stereotype us in a sense. To them, we are all just an updated version of Brueghel’s lumpen, plodding peasants.

  8. 8.

    Delia

    The pathetic thing is all the poor yobs who are yammering away in the same vein, including the ones who live on Social Security and Medicare, but have bought into wingnuttia so deeply they can’t bear to give up on it.

  9. 9.

    Mike Kay

    He’ll get hired by HuffPo.

    Or he could start his own site, he has enough clout, now.

    Too bad Markos didn’t hire Ezra to cover health care instead of letting to the mind-numbing hippies, who ran the site into the trash bin.

  11. 11.

    sturunner

    The only part of the Kaplan Express that is profitable is, wait, Kaplan. Currently under scrutiny for student loan irregularities.

    Carlos Slim loaned the NYT $250 mill at 14%, but of course he was already the largest shareholder at 6.25 %. . . .

  12. 12.

    Jody

    If there’s one thing the elites hate, it’s having holes poked in their perfect li’l worldview.

  13. 13.

    balconesfault

    Insurance is just candy. If you have a few million in the bank, you can always just pick up the doctors bill out of pocket. It’s not that they have no empathy for the working poor … they’re just trying to provide an incentive for the working poor to grab those bootstraps and get their own high paying sinecure so the public doesn’t have to pay for them.

  15. 15.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    There’s an absence of empathy here that borders on a clinical disorder.

    I love it. Turning Dr Kabbagehammer’s “I’m no longer a practicing psychologist, but” schtick back on him. I hope he’s enraged.

    Jonathon Chait, in an otherwise admirable takedown, referred to Samuelson as a “center-right” columnist– I don’t read him regularly, but from everything I’ve seen, he’s a pretty hard right Reaganite.

  17. 17.

    morzer

    It’s worth remembering that the right-wing have already tried to smear Klein and Yglesias as self-hating Jews who betray Israel for pleasure.

  18. 18.

    Jim C.

    I wouldn’t worry too much about Ezra. Look Froomkin, there will always be another quality job out there for talented writers who actually care about facts.

    It may not be in the old media world of the Washington Post, but there will be something.

  19. 19.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Klein had me with his accidental public tweet a few years back:

    He wrote, “fuck tim russert. fuck him with a spiky acid-tipped dick.”

    I’d pay for the lad to finish college.

  22. 22.

    Mike in NC

    It’s been pretty obvious for about a year now that both Samuelson and Krapphammer have terminal cases of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Screw ’em!

  24. 24.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Mike in NC: I’ll mildly defend Chucky K on the ODS by pointing out that he was spitting with rage and psychosis over Al Gore having the seditious gall to suggest that votes should count. “Make no mistake: What we are witnessing is nothing less than the attempted theft of an election.”

    I love it when they say “Make no mistake”. It’s funnier than standing athwart.

  25. 25.

    rootless-e

    I saw this clip of the debate between crist and rubio and Chris Wallace looks at Crist like he’s insane when Crist says he does not want to increase retirement age for SS even for people who are currently 55 or less.

    As if 65 year old manual laborers and waitresses should be required to put off retirement in St. Barts a couple of more years.

  26. 26.

    Llelldorin

    Even when huge, terrorism’s costs can get lost in a $13 trillion economy. At last count, Congress had committed $432 billion to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — a far cry from informal estimates of $50 billion to $200 billion before the Iraq war. The Congressional Budget Office now projects that those costs could easily exceed $800 billion by 2016. A study by Linda Bilmes of Harvard and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia puts the war’s ultimate budget costs even higher, at a minimum of $1.1 trillion in present value. Still, this spending is a tiny share of all federal spending, estimated at $47 trillion from 2001 to 2016.

    —“The Economics of Fear”, Robert Samuelson

    Amazing how… situational… Samuelson’s concern for deficits seems to be. Fully-funded $900 billion? Outrageous. Totally fucking unfunded $1.1 trillion? A tiny share of federal spending.

    Edited to add: You’d think after singing peans to deft financial management in two thousand fucking six, this guy’d STFU for the rest of his life out of sheer embarrassment.

  27. 27.

    Brachiator

    @El Cid:

    The punditariat, at root, hate ordinary struggling folk, love being part of an insider elite, and prefer to have their “real” Americans of the entertaining clown show variety which they imaginarily visit like bungee-jumping anthropologists.

    You got it. The thing is, though, as long as this kind of stuff stays in the Beltway, or is only lapped up by GOP Congress critters, the average citizen might miss the condescension.

    It will be interesting to see how this increasingly shrill elitism plays if conservative politicians try to use this stuff as a major plank of their attempts to derail health care reform.

  28. 28.

    Jason Bylinowski

    I think Ezra Klein has got himself a strong place at the table. He works hard, has paid his dues and was ridiculed as a teen titan blogger, and most importantly, knows how to be civil. The worst one could even say about this post is that it was forcefully opinionated. It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll, but Ezra has been pacing himself nicely. He’s done some good things, and placed himself right up there with Steve Benen in terms of importance on the healthcare issue. I’m actually not his biggest fan, but that’s mainly because I’m cynical, and in my opinion if he’s not completely full of himself by this point, then he must be full of shit. The thing I always worry about is when all these thinkers start believing in their own hype, and worrying more about their paycheck than integrity of thought. I think it’s inevitable, and it’s why there are very few – if any – of the older guys who I don’t have at least some small axe to grind (Joe Klein, Frank Rich, Eugene Robinson, etc) from days gone by.

    But yeah, I know I’m just a Lukore speaking in a Arkon’s world, so take all this with a grain of salt.

  29. 29.

    Violet

    Can someone remind me if Froomkin was on the cable shows as a pundit? Ezra sure is – a fair amount, too. Maybe it’s just because health care was such a big issue, but that got him a lot of exposure. And exposure is good for his career – and by extension, the people employing him.

    Being on TV on a regular basis might buy Ezra a little time in how long he gets to keep his job. Key word – might.

  30. 30.

    Loneoak

    Hell, if NYT can hire Douchehat, they can hire Klein in an instant.

    Klein was, by the way, a fellow Banana Slug. No Known Predators, Beyotches!

  36. 36.

    Josh

    My brain is pretty fried after reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Le Guin, so the only thing I can say with any sense of meaningfulness—right—is that I’m surprised he hasn’t been fired yet.

  38. 38.

    Brian J

    And why is it a bad thing if he’s fired? It’s not as if he’s spent the last couple of months toiling away unnoticed. He’ll move on to a bigger and/or better venue, where his good work won’t be seen alongside the garbage produced by Samuelson.

  40. 40.

    General Egali Tarian Stuck

    The Kraut, and the rest of dandified fascists are just rattled to the core that the public will come to like the security and sense of justice this bill will provide them over time. But first they have to shake the “death panel” and “Armageddon” hangover delivered daily from tight assed right wing pundits telling them Joe Stalin is in the WH and we’re all gonna die.

    Right now it is a tossup imo, whether this country is collectively smart enough to tell truth from the sack loads of shit the GOP and their jackboot mouthbreathers lay on them every single day.

    You would think that 8 years of blood soaked fiction and robbery from Bush/Cheney would have taught the rubes to recognize the ingredients of the wingnut puke funnel, but you would be wrong, apparently. Polls tell us so.

    And every time I try to add it up, the result I get is that we are too damn stupid a country to survive all that much longer, without some urgent assistance from alien civilizations who have a clue.

  41. 41.

    jl

    The macroeconomist Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser has fun with the Robert (not the late Paul) Samuelson piece that is being funned in this post.

    Robert Samuelson on Economics
    econbrowser.com/archives/2010/03/robert_samuelso_1.html

    with a bonus update that links to a Media Matters analysis finding further problems with the column.

    My only comment is that Robert Samuelson offers a false choice between deficit and debt reduction and health care reform. If health care expenditure keeps rising at recent growth rates, and US population health outcomes keep stalling out, then the effect on disability, Medicare and Medicaid expenditure will bankrupt the government, no matter how madly we devote every spare dime to reducing the deficit and paying off the debt.

    Samuelson is not reliable on economics, and Chinn cannot help asking why anyone takes RS seriously at all, which is an uncharacteristic step out of the academic decorum for the Econbrowser blog (which even published macro musing by John Cochrane at the height of the macroeconomics egghead civil wars.)

  42. 42.

    Brian J

    @General Egali Tarian Stuck:

    One of my coworkers–the same jerk whose response to my pointing out that he was not going to be hit by the taxes in the health care reform legislation was to tell me that he’s entitled to his own opinion, apparently irrespective of the facts–joked a few weeks ago about that billboard that pictured Bush with the question, “Miss me yet?” I sincerely hope that nobody except the most hardcore wingnuts feels otherwise. I don’t know about anyone else, but even when I’ve been incredibly frustrated by the Obama administration, I’ve still been on his side. There’s always the possibility of things getter better and better with Obama. I can’t say the same was ever true with Bush.

  43. 43.

    zulif mclaren

    People here came down hard against the possibility that the coincidence between the NIMH’s documented percentage of Americans with diagnosable mental disorders (26.2% of Americans) and the percentage of fanatical far-right loonies (27% or so) might be more than coincidence.

    As always, I was right, and all of you were wrong.

    Autism probably runs through a wide spectrum. It ranges from people who sit in the corner rocking back and forth, to the Dick Cheneys and Robert Samuelsons of the world. Mild functional autism sounds like an excellent explanation for this total lack of empathy for other people.

    Likewise, clinical depression also seems to offer an excellent explanation for total lack of compassion. When you’re consumed with despair and your main thoughts involve killing yourself, obviously you’re going to have zero interest in helping others.

    No, I think diagnosable mental disorders including mild functional autism and bipolar disorder explain a great deal of pathological outlook and dysfunctional behavior of the 27% of the far right. I’d like to see some PET scans of a ranomly selected sample of that 27%. I’m willing to bet we’d see diagnosable mental disorders in almost all of ’em.

  46. 46.

    tc125231

    @jl: Samuelson originally said the war in Iraq would hardly cost anything. When, sometime later (after the Stiglitz study indicating that the Total Cost would exceed $2 trillion) it was pointed out to him that what he had said was untrue, he took the position that we “could afford it” –even if it accomplished zilch.

    NOW he’s worried about deficits. He remains –and has always been –a lying arse wipe.

  51. 51.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @BruinKid: I thought I had read he dropped out. I had a certain respect for a degree-less pundit.

    Just as well. I don’t think I could afford even a semester of UCLA.

  57. 57.

    IndyLib

    @General Egali Tarian Stuck: @Keith G:

    That was one on my Dad’s favorite phrases, along with “built like a brick shithouse” (I always thought this one was particularly complimentary to the woman being described), “doesn’t have the sense to pour piss out of a boot” and “if her boobs were brains she’d be a rocket scientist”.
    In my Dad’s case it wasn’t hillbilly, just born and raised in the boonies of southern Colorado. And he used these phrases until the day he died, despite the fact that he was a CPA and CFP.

  59. 59.

    Nick

    It’s frustrating living amongst these people. This is not the America I was raised to love. These are people who measure a person’s relevance in society by how many numbers appear on their paycheck or on their bank statements. These are people who believe everyone can achieve the American dream, providing they are born with enough wealth to purchase it. These are people who claim allegiance to God, when their real allegiance is to anything that ends in Corp. or Inc. These are people who live life by the mantra “I got mine, screw the rest of you”

  65. 65.

    Triassic Sands

    It’s amazing how unimportant health coverage is to people who have excellent health coverage.

    It’s like two SCUBA divers. One has a full tank; the other’s is empty. They’re at 100 feet and the one with the full tank tells the one with the empty tank that oxygen is highly overrated.

    Samuelson writes:

    Should the United States someday suffer a budget crisis, it will be hard not to conclude that Obama and his allies sowed the seeds, because they ignored conspicuous warnings.

    What? Has this guy been in a coma? He could easily have written exactly those words about Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. And surely he uttered the same opinion numerous times during the spend-and-don’t-tax George W. Bush years.

    The lack of integrity is stunning — typical, normal, expected, but still stunning.

  66. 66.

    MobiusKlein

    Ezra is a loss leader for the WaPo. Sure, he slags their staff, but he also provide an avenue for a different customer base to come visit the shop. The credibility they gain from him being there enables their other less honorable writers to have ‘balance’ shields.

  67. 67.

    Triassic Sands

    I just tried to send Samuelson a comment about his column.

    It seems the Washington Post doesn’t know the whereabouts of Samuelson. This is the message I got when I filled in the contact form and clicked “send.”

    E-mail address not available

    We’re sorry, but we don’t have a contact information on file for the person you’d like to contact.

    © 2010 The Washington Post Company

    Apparently, Samuelson is now hanging out in an “undisclosed location.”

  68. 68.

    Keith G

    @Triassic Sands:

    Gosh darn. Samulson et al are so afraid we might be tempted to push the marginal tax rate for top incomes up from the current 35% to something more realistic.

    Remember in 1918 it was 70%, in 1982 it was 50%, before thing got a bit out of control.

  70. 70.

    Knecht Ruprecht

    Ironically, part of Krauthammer’s schtick is the remote diagnosis of mental illness in his political opponents.

  71. 71.

    Mum

    @El Cid:

    I’m still giggling over the visuals. I’ve copied your sentence into a journal I keep of quotes I like to revisit (with proper attribution, of course). Thanks for the brilliant imagery.

  72. 72.

    bob h

    The $1 trillion represents only about .5% of our economy over ten years. How “Armageddon” can be triggered by what is basically a financial perturbation is beyond me.

  73. 73.

    Lisa K.

    And before you think this is all about Samuelson, consider that Charles Krauthammer calls coverage “candy.” There’s an absence of empathy here that borders on a clinical disorder.

    It is in fact a clinical disorder, as attested in the DSM-IV:

    mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

    I don’t know if there is an accompanying disorder relating to the delusion that money makes one divine…

  75. 75.

    Paul in KY

    Josh, ‘Left Hand of Darkness’ is pretty intense. I think it’s LeGuin’s best book.

  76. 76.

    Waynski

    Now that Obama has proven to the Villagers that he and the Democrats really are the ones in power by bitchslapping the Republicans on healthcare, I’ll take a contarian view and surmise that Ezra’s job is fairly safe. I imagine he has better contacts within the administration than many of the old dogs and their irrelevance will continue to grow. I think Ezra may have actually been flxing his new muscles a bit. I’d be more worried about my job if I was Boner and Cantor if they fail in the midterms. Time and circumstances will tell.

  77. 77.

    Colin Laney

    Klein will eventually be fired for writing things like this.

    Nope. He’ll be fired for writing things like this.

  78. 78.

    Elie

    @zulif mclaren:

    I think that mental illness is one of the single most important contributory factors to much societal dysfunction on all sides, but I do think you raise a provocative thought: are certain mental health pathology more prevalent in the right wing? Anedotally, it would seem so and certainly, some individuals seem afflicted with some sort of severe “mind blindness” or the inability to see others’ perspective or point of view.

    Its also true that lifelong immersion in a homogenous social culture that repeats as a mantra that winners take all and that violence and coercion are reasonable means to “convince” others to do as you want, its less about mental illness than just an isolated culture that needs to have more contact with the world. My guess is that the children of these people will not be like their parents, but that it may take time for the culture of the larger society to penetrate it. The catastrophic meme that is entering their awareness and is therefore so threatenning is that “we are all in this together”. After years of “its my way or the highway” they cannot process it — hence the tantrums and extreme anxiety. Living in cooperation and acceptance has to be learned. The Republicans going back to the 70’s intentionally taught them (poor and working class whites), the opposite and made them fearful and anxious that joining the larger society would hurt them. It will take their own experience with it to change that over time…

  79. 79.

    JohnR

    @Kristine:

    You already have no reason. Reading Ezra in the Post is like getting a lollipop between waterboarding sessions. One doesn’t make up for the rest.

  80. 80.

    JohnR

    @Llelldorin:

    You’d think after singing peans to deft financial management in two thousand fucking six, this guy’d STFU for the rest of his life out of sheer embarrassment.

    That was then. This is now.

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