Apparently Klein didn't get the memo about denying the presence of socialism in the Democrats' plan.
In a piece published last Wednesday called "The Left's Idiocy on Health Reform," Klein expressed concern that the far left, angry at the bill for not being socialist enough, would stop supporting it. The goal of the column was to convince ardent liberals to embrace the Senate bill as a matter of loyalty to their party.
President Obama's radical ambitions cannot survive without money and organizing from the nutroots, which prompted Klein to launch a massive guilt bomb in an effort to win them back. He slipped into full-blown talking point mode as he made his case, sounding more like a Democrat strategist than a columnist:
To be sure, the bill that emerged from the Senate has problems. But it is landmark social legislation that guarantees and subsidizes health care coverage for 30 million Americans who don't have it now. Yes, this means a lot of new customers for the insurance companies - but the insurers will face strict new regulations, and many of their new customers will be people they refused to cover in the past. Ultimately, it means an annual income redistribution of $200 billion to help the working poor pay for insurance, which is why Republicans oppose the bill. But Jacob Hacker, the leading promoter of the public option, favors it. Every Democratic Senator, including those like Ohio's Sherrod Brown who have impeccable liberal records, favors it.
Klein was correct about one point: the main reason Republicans oppose the bill is because of the socialist agenda. The bills crafted by the House and Senate were never about providing better healthcare - the plan was always for the government to simply seize private wealth and pass it around in the name of healthcare reform.
Only when the media speak candidly to liberals does this truth come out. Back in October, while trying to appeal to a larger audience, Klein took a more somber tone about an impending tax increase as a necessary evil for "fiscally responsible" politicians to discuss. The October column also aimed much lower by reporting the amount of the tax hike as a modest $35 billion.
Suddenly, a mere 60 days later when writing to the left, Klein reported with glee that some $200 billion would be seized every year.
The promise of massive wealth distribution was clearly offered to secure support from prominent liberals. Klein opened his column with a jab at "the snarkier precincts of the left-wing blogosphere" who had turned sour on the Senate bill. In reaching for the worst insult he could find to fling their way, Klein resorted to comparing them to Fox News:
Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as that other, more populous hamlet, the right-wing Fox News and Limbaugh slum. Hilariously, as we stagger from one awful decade into the next, there has been a coagulation of these extremes - a united front against the turgid ceremonies of legislative democracy, like compromise, and disdain for the politician most responsible for nudging our snarled checks and balances toward action, Barack Obama. The issue that has brought them together is opposition to the Senate's health care-reform bill, which makes some sense on the right, but none at all on the left.
According to Klein, it made "no sense" for liberals to join conservatives in trying to kill a badly written bill that satisfied no one other than lobbyists. Overwhelming public opposition to the plan was not because Americans were unified, but that the left was acting too much like the right.
To drive home the point that liberals had no business siding with conservatives, Klein ridiculed those on the right as unworthy of being taken seriously:
The prejudices of the tea partiers, birthers, deathers, Palinites and other assorted "real" Americans are well known; the historic conservative opposition to universal health care isn't news.
With liberal readers now sufficiently afraid of being lumped in with Sarah Palin, Klein finished his column with a plea for left-wing unity to stop a Republican revival in 2010:
In the end, the sillier left-village practitioners are stoking the same populist exaggeration - the idea that Washington is controlled by crooks and sellouts - that conservative strategists like Bill Kristol believe will bring the Republicans back to power. The perversity of this is beyond comprehension.
Heaven help us if liberals start realizing the Democrat party is corrupt. The left and the right, finally disgusted by the cronyism, joining forces to drain the swamp inside the beltway?
Only to a liberal columnist would that idea be perverse.
Whatever it takes to finally realize the goal of a massive wealth distribution plan. Forget the "crooks and sellouts" who wrote the bill. Don't stop and think for a moment that someone who likes Sarah Palin could possibly be right about something. The Senate bill seizes wealth, and that should be enough to make you happy.
At least someone in the media was honest enough to admit it.
