Top progressive blogger rips unrepentant, fairweather pundit Joe Klein

[agent007]

Salon.com's Glen Greenwald today called on Time Magazine pundit Joe Klein to express remorse and apologize for cheering hard for George W. Bush when it was cool to do so. Greenwald then shows an example of Klein's "extreme revisionism":

Joe Klein, this week's Time Magazine, on George Bush's legacy:

Bush has that forlorn what-the-hell-happened? expression on his face, the one that has marked his presidency at difficult times. You never want to see the President of the United States looking like that.

So I've been searching for valedictory encomiums. . . . I'd add the bracing moment of Bush with the bullhorn in the ruins of the World Trade Center, but that was neutered in my memory by his ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the "Mission Accomplished" sign. The flight-suit image is one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure.

Joe Klein, Face the Nation, May 4, 2003, with Bob Schieffer -- 3 days after Bush's Mission Accomplished speech:

BOB SCHIEFFER: How does play off against the pictures we saw this week of President Bush landing on the aircraft -- aircraft carrier and appearing before these screaming, adoring groups of military people? As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time. And if you're a political consultant, you can just see campaign commercial written all over the pictures of George Bush.

JOE KLEIN: Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. That was the first thing that came to mind for me. And it just shows you how high a mountain these Democrats are going to have to climb. You compare that image, which everybody across the world saw, with this debate last night where you have nine people on a stage and it doesn't air until 11:30 at night, up against Saturday Night Live, and you see what a major, major struggle the Democrats are going to have to try and beat a popular incumbent president.

link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/11/26/klein/index.html

[gratuitous]

1. Joke Line has rewritten his own personal story

And any of his prior sycophancy has been erased from his memory, as he once again emerges as the hero of his own life story, always perspicacious, seeing long before anyone else how things were going, and always - always - at least three steps ahead of the curve.

[Captain Hilts]

2. Don't forget how Rich, Dowd and Herbert trashed Gore. nt