"Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue."

So wrote Time's Joe Klein Friday at the magazine's Swampland blog in a piece intended to be the columnist's critique of the Administration's recent demonization of the Fox News Channel.

Comically, with virtually every admonishment of the White House's strategy to attack Fox Klein offered -- wait for it! -- an attack on Fox:

On Monday, NewsBusters asked, "How do you know when an extraordinarily liberal politician is failing badly?"

Tuesday's answer is: When an extraordinarily liberal journalist like the Washington Post's Richard Cohen not only notices, but is willing to write about it AND get his critique published.

As if coordinated, Cohen followed Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman's "The Limits of Charisma: Mr. President, Please Stay Off TV" with a well-timed smackdown of his own called "Time to Act Like a President":

Time Magazine's Joe Klein leveled another accusation of racism against Tea Party protesters today, employing fallacious arguments that could be torn apart by any student of basic logic.

Tea Party protesters, by Klein's account, are similar to the caricature of the 1990s religious right: "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command," in the words of the Washington Post. Klein takes that WaPo adage and adds 'racist' to the end.

The Tea Party protesters are scared above all, Klein asserts, "by an amorphous feeling that they [sic] America they imagined they were living in--Sarah Palin's fantasy America--is a different place now, changing for the worse, overrun by furriners of all sorts: Latinos, South Asians, East Asians, homosexuals...to say nothing of liberated, uppity blacks...

NBC's Norah O'Donnell, guest hosting for Chris Matthews over the weekend, repeatedly questioned her "Chris Matthews Show" panelists why there was "So much hate," and "venom," directed at Barack Obama at town hall events.

Time's Joe Klein responded it was all Rush Limbaugh's fault as he depicted opponents of Obama as racists that are "being egged on by the demagogues in, in the Republican Party, by Boss Rush Limbaugh. And I call him the boss because there isn't a single Republican elected official who's willing to call him out on his lies." [audio available here]

In the declining glossy-paper pages of Time magazine, columnist Joe Klein suggests that our national character and the passage of socialist health care expansion are inherently linked. (Insert here: every time Anonymous Joe makes claims to "character," remind everyone of how he lied for months about his authorship of Primary Colors.)

Near the end of the piece, he decried "demented" speakers at town hall meetings, and engaged in wishful thinking:

The Republicans could well find that their recalcitrance and ugly misinformation are a millstone in the next election.

But it is also possible that the Limbaugh- and Glenn Beck–inspired poison will spread from right-wing nutters to moderates and independents who are a necessary component of Obama's governing coalition.

According to the polls, Obama has lost 20 points among independents in recent months. It would be a good thing if the President's speech turns the tide, and the remainder of this historic debate is conducted on higher ground, but I'm not sure that it will. As the man [Obama] said, it is a test of our national character ... in more ways than one.

Is there a doctor within shouting distance of 30 Rockefeller Center?  Joe Klein, a guest on this morning’s edition of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” is suffering from massive historical hallucinations.

In fact, just make that general hallucinations.

Among the litany of reality-bending ideas he presented were:

• The overheated rhetoric during the Bush years was much less disturbing than the overheated rhetoric now
• That the Democrat Party immediately spoke out en masse against the infamous MoveOn.org advertisement which called General David Petraeus “General Betray-Us”
• That the current health care bill will not lead to rationing of care 
• That moving doctors to a salary-based system rather than a pay-for-procedure system would cause an improvement in said health-care system
• That all conservative arguments against the currently proposed health-care plan are, in a word, fantasy
• And last but not least, the obligatory assertion that Republicans are generally racists.

No, I am not exaggerating in the slightest.  The transcript for this is quite long, so I apologize in advance for the epic length of this post.  Liberal bilge, however, requires the proper plumbing.

Klein’s original commentary occurred in his latest column, which diagnosed a “public malignancy” in the current atmosphere of debate (h/t Marc Sheppard):

After plugging his latest column in a September 10 post on the magazine's Swampland blog, Time's Joe Klein (shown in file photo at right) pegged Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) as "vile" before defending taxpayer-funded health care for illegal immigrants:

On this whole question of whether illegal immigrants will be included in  the plan, which caused the vile Congressman from South Carolina to shout "You lie" when the President said they wouldn't be covered. Why shouldn't they be? After all, when an illegal immigrant cuts his hand while chopping cabbage and goes to the emergency room, the rest of us pay for it. Isn't the point to expand the risk pool as much as possible, to lure the insurance companies into concessions and lower prices?

I know it 's not going to happen. Congress will never vote to subsidize the health care of those who arrived here illegally. But, given the fact that we're already subsidizing them through the back door, it does make sense, doesn't it?

Reflecting on "How Ted Kennedy Found Himself," Time's Joe Klein today let readers in on an encounter with the Massachusetts senator in the 1970s when he was stoned and Kennedy drunk.

The occasion, Klein receiving an "honorable mention" journalism award from the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial foundation in 1974.

Klein explained how their conversation at the reception centered around an earlier incident in which Sen. Kennedy had been pelted with tomatoes by angry constituents:

Time magazine’s Joe Klein complained about the legal appearance of openly-carried weapons at protests against President Obama during a segment on CNN’s Newsroom on Monday, and labeled the protests against ObamaCare as a “celebration of ignorance and misinformation.” Anchor Rick Sanchez and his other guest also falsely characterized one of the guns carried at a recent protest.

Sanchez first asked Klein about the appearance of guns at several recent protests against President Obama outside his health care town hall events or speeches: “Joe, I don’t remember people protesting against President Bush showing up with weapons. Do you?” The Time columnist answered, “No. I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years now, and I’ve never seen anything like this. There should be like a Second Amendment equivalent of the First Amendment- shouting fire in a crowded theater.”

"The cruelty inherent in scaring the elderly to score political points is beyond reprehensible.... [T]he sort of scurrilous campaign they are conducting--the seditious fear-mongering that is the main staple of their public diet--is a matter of profound disrespect and incivility toward the individuals whose rights they claim to cherish."

So huffed Time magazine's Joe Klein, in an August 12 Swampland blog post seething at rumors of "death panels" being provided for in health care reform legislation before Congress. Klein expressed disgust at Republicans who would seek political advantage by scaring the elderly with inaccurate and misleading rhetoric.

But one might wonder where Klein's moral indignation was during the 1990s, when the liberal media, including Time magazine, were complicit in bolstering the Democratic meme about drastic Republican "cuts" to Medicare.

As MRC archives show, the liberal media was complicit with liberal Democrats in the 1990s in scaring seniors into fearing non-existent "cuts" to Medicare. From the July 1996 MediaWatch (emphasis mine):

The average Israeli -- unlike globe-trotting liberal journalists -- is provincial and blissfully unaware of how wrong-headed his government is. That's why Barack Obama needs to work his persuasive charm on the Israeli public in order to put pressure on the Netanyahu government to accede to the Obama administration's demands as regards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That's according to Time's Joe Klein, who of course argued thus in a longer-winded and softer-sounding manner in his July 28 blog post (emphasis mine):

So what's the biggest obstacle to Mideast peace? Hamas terrorists who refuse to accept Israel has a right to exist? Perhaps the Iranian government that finances anti-Israel terror operations? Neither, according to Time's Joe Klein (shown at right in file photo), who insists in a July 20 Swampland blog post the fault lies with Israel:

Benjamin Netanyahu's phony flexibility on a two-state solution was always transparent--and it's now becoming apparent that Israel is the prime impediment to progress in the Middle East. Over the weekend, the State Department asked Israel's Ambassador Michael Oren to convey U.S. displeasure over continued Israeli settlement expansion in Jerusalem, which Netanyahu rejected out of hand.

Although Netanyahu and his coalition government won their February election -- some three months after Obama won his and just weeks after his inauguration-- fair and square, Klein makes clear he has no use for the will of the Israeli people and the decisions of their duly-elected government if and when they peeve the Obama administration:

Republicans, particularly those who are the biggest fans of Gov. Sarah Palin, are stuck in the vestiges of the 1984 "white-bread fantasy" of Reagan's "Morning in America," huffs Time magazine's Joe Klein in a July 6 Swampland blog post on "Sarah Palin's America":

All this talk about Sarah Palin's constituency being "real Americans" raises the question, yet again, of who the unreal Americans are. Last September, when the Governor burst upon the scene like a head-on collision, I wrote that Palin's America--white folks, small towns, traditional values--was a Republican fantasy, a vestige of Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" hornswoggle in the 1980s. (This fantasy was reinforced by John McCain's fetishizing of Joe the Unlicensed Plumber.)

Real America is much different from, and more interesting than, that white-bread fantasy, a problem the Republican Party--the party of immigrant bashing--will be wrestling with for the immediate future.

Klein conveniently omitted that 2008 presidential nominee Sen. John McCain was hardly an immigrant basher, heavily criticized by conservatives in the GOP for his push for amnesty for illegal immigrants. What's more, it was President Reagan who signed the last amnesty bill in 1986, another inconvenient fact that cuts against Klein suggesting Reagan was a quasi-racist xenophobe.

As if to bolster his own cosmopolitan credentials with which to better slam Gov. Palin as provincial, Klein casually dropped a reference to a party he recently attended in the Islamic Republic of Iran:

If beating dead horses were an Olympic event, Joe Klein would have more medals gracing his neck than Michael Phelps.

On his magazine's Swampland blog, the Time columnist returned to his latest overwrought left-wing pandering point: labeling hardliner President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Iranian version of George W. Bush:

The protesters admire our freedom, but they are appalled--and insulted--by our neocolonialist condescension over the past 50 years. The reformers, and even some conservatives, consider Ahmadinejad the George W. Bush of Iran--a crude, unsophisticated demagogue, who puts a strong Potemkin face to the world without very much knowledge of what the rest of the world is about. This was an anology [sic] that came up in interview after interview, with reformers and conservatives alike.

Klein doesn't explicitly reference the "axis of evil" remarks  in then-President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address as an offense, although he quite probably has it in mind. Yet a review of the relevant passage from that speech shows Bush was dead-on and arguably eerily prophetic about the iron-fisted repression that the world is witness to presently on the streets of Tehran (portion in bold is my emphasis):

In the midst of his June 16 Swampland blog screed leveled against the "unhinged" Sen. John McCain for his criticism of President Obama's low-key response to the Iranian election, Time magazine's Joe Klein [shown in file photo at right] also worked in a comparison of hardliner Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's support base with former U.S. President George W. Bush's core supporters:

It is not even clear that Ahmadinejad--who has significant backing from the sort of people who support Republicans here (the elderly, the religious extremists) plus a real following among working-class Iranians--would have lost this election, if the votes had been counted fairly. (I tend to believe that they weren't counted at all, but that's just my opinion.)

Twelve days earlier, Klein more subtly made the Ahmadinejad/Bush connection in a comparison that favorably compared Iranian presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi to Bush's 2004 rival Sen. John Kerry (emphasis mine):

Time magazine's Joe "Anonymous" Klein is at it again.

Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb yesterday picked up on how the journalist -- who as we've documented is harsher on Israel than Iran -- credited a terrorist with having a "good question" about what pressure the Obama administration will place on the Netanyahu government regarding settlements in Palestinian territories:

Joe Klein, who has in the past boldly declared himself "not a big fan" of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, sits down with the terror group's commander in chief for an interview in the wake of Obama's speech:

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On May 20, Politico had an interesting little treatment of columnist Charles Krauthammer crowning him as the most important conservative columnist of the day. A brief overview of his life and his emergence as the most reliable voice against Obamaism served as the main subject for the piece, but a few quotes on Mr. Krauthammer made by other columnists added a sense of how respected Krauthammer is to scribe Ben Smith's piece. All the quotes were complimentary but shockingly, in one of those quotes, lefty Time columnist Joe Klein seemed to hint that a person in a wheelchair was incapable of really understanding enough of the world to make for a worthy columnist.

Can you imagine? In this day and age, saying that a person in a wheelchair is incapable of really understanding the world because they can't easily get out there themselves because of their disability? And, how does a lefty columnist get away with saying this? Will no one scold Klein for his conceit that because he has two working legs that this fact somehow automatically makes him better qualified to opine as a columnist than a wheelchair-bound Krauthammer? Here is how Politico quoted Joe Klein on Charles Krauthammer (my bold):

Chris Matthews asked his panel of reporters, on this weekend's syndicated "The Chris Matthews Show," to offer their prescriptions on how the GOP, in the wake of the Arlen Specter departure, can regain its popularity to which most of the liberal reporters like Joe Klein and Howard Fineman suggested they needed to abandon their "cut taxes, shrink government," message and some of their "trollish"spokesmen like Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich because they're turning off families, women and "people who think that caring matters."[audio available here]

First up Time magazine's Joe Klein suggested the GOP should moderate on health care because it would finally make them, "look sane!" and "bring them into...the mainstream of American politics." Then Newsweek's Fineman charged it was the conservative message of "cut taxes, shrink," government that was the problem: "But it doesn't sell with, with people outside of their base demographic which are white males. There's something about that message that turns off families, that turns off women, that turns off people who think that caring matters about other-, I know that this sounds silly, but caring about other people." And finally Matthews went further saying it's not just the GOP's message but it's messengers who are the problem: "Can you, can you, can they get past the cacophony of Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich? These are sort of trollish figures. These aren't the caring people, are they?"

The following exchange occurred on the May 3 edition of "The Chris Matthews Show":

There’s something very curious – even laughable – about watching the media assemble to offer President Obama a grade after the first 100 days. They weren’t exactly a team of dispassionate scientists in a lab. They continue to be what they’ve been all along -- a rolling gaggle of Obama cheerleaders -- only before it was a campaign and now it’s an administration. So now they’re assessing whether their awe-inspiring historic candidate still glows with the luster of victory. Hmm...let’s see. They applied the luster, they boasted of the luster, and you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll continue doing both.

Remember Chris Matthews, and apply his pre-inauguration pledge across the media: "I want to do everything I can to make this thing work, this new presidency work."

So who died and made Time's Joe Klein the head of Mossad? Because clearly he is a better military intelligence expert than anyone in Israel, judging by his April 22 blog post on "Israel's Iran Game" at the magazine's Swampland blog (emphasis mine):

I have no doubt that Israel is--legitimately--freaked out by Iran, although not so much by the prospect of an Iranian bomb as by Iran's support for Hezbollah and Hamas. (The only plausible use of an Iranian bomb would be as a deterrent against Israel's own nuclear weapons.) But it seems clear that the Netanyahu government's wild overstatement of the Iranian threat, and its linkage to progress on the Palestinian issue, is a subterfuge to allow the continued illegal Israeli settlement of Palestinian areas on the West Bank, which will ultimately subvert a two-state solution.

Whatever should Obama do? Klein would be glad you asked, and even if you hadn't, he'd probably tell you anyway (emphasis mine):