Joe Klein Is "All Opinion and Very Little Information"

Time Magazine's Joe Klein appeared on CNN last night and said "I bow to nobody in, in my disdain for bloggers. They're all opinions and very little information." What a truly incredible statement from person like Klein - one of America's foremost fact-averse pundits.

Consider just a few glaring examples of Klein's love of the sound of his own opinions, and hatred for actual concrete information. This past summer, for instance, Klein ignored concrete public opinion and demographic data and went off on a factless tangent about how Democrats should continue to pursue Republican-lite policies as a way to win elections.

Last month it was Klein who, in a desperate attempt to suck up to Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R), essentially left out all relevant facts about health care in a column about the issue.

And finally, just a few weeks ago, Klein offered up a column that can only be classified as the vainglorious fictions of a person who holds facts and concrete information in total contempt. Among other fact-free distortions in his January 8th piece was one where he claimed "a strong majority would favor the NSA program" that President Bush illegally ordered, and that "Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo's family in the right-to-die case last year."

Klein published his piece one day after the Associated Press published its poll showing "a majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists." In criticizing the administration for not getting warrants as required by law, Democrats were standing with 56 percent of the public. By contrast, ABC News reported that just 27 percent of the public supported the Republicans' intervention in the Schiavo affair. (And, oh, by the way, as Klein now righteously attacks the GOP over its stand on Terri Schiavo, remember that it was Klein who during the Schiavo controversy published another fact-free column a month after that ABC poll claiming Democrats should not criticize the GOP over the Schiavo controversy and should "give careful consideration to what thoughtful conservatives are saying" about it.)

I'll say this: Joe Klein really is someone to stand back and behold. Here is a pundit publicly chastising others for supposedly lacking respect for accuracy and integrity, yet who himself has been repeatedly embarrassed for publishing pieces that have absolutely no connection to facts, concrete information or reality. As the American Prospect's Greg Sargent noted, "Dropping an obligatory snide generalization - or an outright distortion - about liberal Dems into his columns seems to be an occupational requirement for him these days...These omissions and distortions are beginning to suggest a pattern which borders, at best, on professional negligence, and at worst, on rank dishonesty." That, in a nutshell, is Joe Klein.

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