Blowhard Time pundit sings a song of himself

When Joe Klein signed up with Time magazine as a political columnist in 2003, he turned to this quote from Teddy Roosevelt for the name of his weekly dispatch, which he dubbed "In the Arena": "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. ... The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood ... and who, at worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly."

Klein has written that he intended the reference as a sort of self-effacing rebuke, a constant reminder that he is but a humble critic who chronicles the doings of deeds. But to believe that interpretation, one must ignore the fact that Klein's body of work amounts to little more than a festival of projection and poorly disguised vanity. This is the man, after all, who, unsatisfied with writing about Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign as a mere critic, rather famously refashioned himself into a central player in that campaign in his 1996 novel, Primary Colors. If Joe Klein is contemplating a man in an arena, his face marred by dust and sweat and blood, daring greatly, you can rest assured that the man he is contemplating is Joe Klein.

If Joe Klein is contemplating a man in an arena, his face marred by dust and sweat and blood, daring greatly, you can rest assured that the man he is contemplating is Joe Klein

And, oh, how our hero has dared in the arena of late! For the past three weeks, Klein has been the subject of withering attacks from left-wing bloggers after he wrote, falsely, in his November 21 column that the Democratic proposal for amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would "give the terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." The debate is arcane and ludicrously complicated, and it has generated literally tens of thousands of words online and in print, mostly condemning Klein, and most of them from Salon's Glenn Greenwald (who, God love him, has approached his subject with the tenacity and righteousness of an obsessive-compulsive IRS auditor). But suffice it to say that (a) Klein made a stupid error, and (b) his preposterously arrogant and ham-fisted attempts to walk himself back from that error have almost rendered reasonable Greenwald's claim that the episode illustrates "everything that is rancid and corrupt with our political media."

The FISA dispute is but the latest skirmish in an ongoing campaign that has been marring Klein's brow with dust and blood and sweat since January, when Time launched its political blog, Swampland. Klein is one of its regular contributors, and there is no better conceivable foil than he for the blogocentric criticism that the political journalism establishment is populated by preening, clueless, lazy, and pompous regurgitators of conventional wisdom. Swampland's commenters have joined the battle with glee; the first comment to one of Klein's first posts on Swampland read simply: "Just because I hate to see the lefties get all the credit, let the record show that at least one moderate Republican finds you despicable." More than 3,000 comments followed that post alone, and the vicious mockery has continued, virtually unabated, all year.

Klein's reactions on Swampland to his FISA critics are precious goldmines of self-aggrandizing pretense that must be savored at length to appreciate their rich subtleties and overtones. His first response acknowledged—in an insufferably cloying way—that although partisan murk clouded the issue, he "may" have made a mistake, before going on to claim that if he indeed had made a mistake, "we are talking about relatively obscure and unimportant technical details." In other words, Klein sat down to write a column about obscure and unimportant technical details.

Klein's next weigh-in on the blog, two days later, was headlined "FISA: More Than You Want to Know," as though his responsibility to assess the veracity or lack thereof of the claims he made in his columns involved some kind of burdensome slog through legislative thickets beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Why are you making me do this? This is hard! His post artfully shifted the issue from whether the bill says what he said it says to whether his Republican sources or Democratic sources were correct in their interpretations (who knows? This law stuff is complicated) before actually committing to pixels the following words, which will live on as one of the finest specimens of sheer journalistic hubris ever issued from one of the genre's most accomplished practitioners: "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." I don't have time find out if what I write is true, people! I'm too busy claiming that other things are true. And even if I did have time, I'm not qualified to say whether the things I write are true anyway!

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