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:
I don't understand why the White House would give such poisonous helium balloons as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity the opportunity for still greater spasms of self-inflation by declaring war on Fox.
If the problem is that stories bloated far beyond their actual importance--ACORN's corruption, Van Jones's radical past--are in danger of leaching out of the Fox hothouse into the general media, then perhaps the Administration should be a bit more diligent about whom it hires and whom it funds.
If the problem is broader--that Fox News spreads seditious lies to its demographic sliver of an audience--the Administration should probably be stoic: the wingnuts will always be with us. The best antidote to their garbage is elegant, intelligent governance. The next-best antidote is occasional engagement: I thought Obama came away from his O'Reilly and Chris Wallace interviews much the better for it. (Though you don't want to sit down with a thug like Hannity or a weirdo like Beck.)
Hmmm. In the same article he accused Fox of peddling hateful crap he referred to Hannity as a thug and Beck as a weirdo.
Don't journalists understand that they can't accuse others of hate with the same keyboard they dole out invective of their own?
Possibly a stupid question for someone that wrote:
The Administration has tried to pursue a sophisticated, difficult domestic and foreign policy. It doesn't offer the quick-fix irresponsibility of a tax cut or an invasion. It needs space, time and patience to explain. This is an enervating, midstream moment. It's not certain that the President's efforts from health care to Afghanistan will succeed. We'll know a lot more in a month.
So, tax cuts are an irresponsible quick-fix, but "[w]e'll know a lot more in a month" if "the President's efforts from health care to Afghanistan will succeed."
Staggering logic, wouldn't you agree, especially for a man who will likely continue to blame any failures of the current president no matter how long he's in office on George W. Bush.
