First things first. Brendan and I changed the name of our podcast from Progress Podcast to Progress Pondcast. We just went live with Episode 2 which focuses on decisions made last week by the Washington Post. In particular, we examine their choice of our old friend Joe Klein, aka Joke Line, to write an opinion piece on President Joe Biden’s unforgivable compassion for his son Hunter who Klein compares to Timothy McVeigh and Dylann Roof.
I’m not kidding.
I went through the archives here and found some typical stories I wrote about Klein back in the early days of the liberal blogosphere, which included:
Joe Klein Explains the Art of the Wank
Joe Klein: The Anatomy of a Wank
Amanda Resigns, Joe Klein Wanks
Joe Klein: A Corporate Shill Villager
Joe Klein, Paris Hilton, and Scooter Libby
Klein and Terrabytes of Florid Concern
And, you get the picture. Looking back, Klein can really take credit for one thing and that’s identifying Glenn Greenwald as a terrible person before that was widely known and accepted. Otherwise, he deserved everything he got. But I also noticed that I have only made reference to Joke Line one time since 2008, and that was a piece I wrote in 2016 called Joe Klein Says the Strangest Things. In that article, I wrote that Klein “sounds like a…McGovern Baby battered spouse,” who “seems to have an aversion to the left [that] leads him to say the dumbest things.”
Anyway, he wants Biden to set his lone surviving son Hunter on fire and launch him into space, and Brendan and I disagree with that approach and with the Washington Post‘s decision to dig Klein up out of the political punditry graveyard and promote his point of view.
We also wonder why the Washington Post did a hard reporting piece on all the reasons why maybe we might not want to put Donald Trump in prison even if he’s convicted of some of the most serious crimes ever committed by an American in the country’s entire history. They are basically advocating that Trump be confined to one of his luxurious resorts and maybe do some highway trash cleanup as penance. Brendan and I don’t understand how this sort of punishment fits the crime, nor why the Washington Post is putting the horse so far before the cart.
So, give it a listen, like, subscribe and the normal things that people do when they enjoy a podcast.
5
Damn, I have not given a minutes thought to Joe Klein in YEARS!! Honestly, I assumed the fucker was dead. As it turns out he’s not only alive, but he’s still one of the top 5 dumbest pundits on the planet. Who can forget his seemingly endless presence on our televisions during the Bush years, telling us all how unpatriotic and ignorant the dumb fucking hippies were about the Iraq War and the WMD’s, and how Democrats should just bow down and kiss the ass of the almighty Shrub, cuz he was the most awesome war Preznit in modern times.
Joe Fucking Klein!! Still as dumb as a post.
Still a nasty individual, too.
I also thought he was dead. His brain is so empty he might as well be dead. A regular Mike the Headless Chicken, he keeps pecking away.
One thing that should be added (I’m relaying from memory as Joe Klein is not worth the research), is that Klein authored a biography of Woody Guthrie, and he was on the record as expecting that doing so should have granted him lasting/lifetime credibility in the progressive readership, despite his dipshittery as a columnist.
It’s just another example of where he started and where he ended up.