No, the issue is really whether we are willing to me monsters, or not. Nothing more, nothing less.

aakkk!!! jokeline v. glenzilla … talk about a serious mismatch .. lol

Respected beltway journalist (and therefore intelligent, informed, and ethical) vs blogger (and therefore unintelligent, uninformed, and unethical). What hope could the blogger guy have?

it’s just a personal opinion, but i really don’t think klein is very smart.

you don’t have to be real a smart person, i’ve observed over the years, to be real cunning and real effective -

rats and lizards and snakes are real cunning, that how they catch their food.

reading the story before me, i think klein is an angry, frustrated, spoiled-brat of a “famous” reporter-

and has recently behaved like one.

but his commentary never struck me as sharp – just cunningly obtained and cunningly written.

quotes joe kline thusly:

“There’s another part of Klein’s argument that really bothers me. The first paragraph of his screed starts out like this:

Twice in the past month, my private communications have been splashed about the internet. That such a thing would happen is unfortunate, and dishonorable, but sadly inevitable, I suppose. I ignored the first case, in which a rather pathetic woman acolyte of Greenwald’s published a hyperbolic account of a conversation I had with her at a beach picnic on Cape Cod. …”

let’s see,

time magazine journalist joe kline is upset – upset about having his communications bruited about the internet?

would this be the same joe kline who waylaid the clintons with a contemptuous anonymous novel after previously professing near-worshipful admiration for bill clinton?

poor little fellow.

poor whining little puppy.

when stephen brill was publishing the media criticism magazine “brill’s content” he used to say that all journalists should go through the hell of one of the media firestorms they routinely visit on others.

i agree.

Shorter myself above: It’s the mythology! And, believe it or not, no offense intended, but you expressed it yourself: to cannonball. As Austin Powers might say, That’s so 19th century, baby!

What are we: beings, or machines? What kind of cosmos do we inhabit: Reality-based community, or The Matrix?

Machines have no free will. So if we want to pretend the cosmos is a Newtonian mechanism, ignoring the last century or so of physics, then we have to admit that the torturers and war-mongers and assorted priests of realpolitik are right: torture works at keeping down dissenters.

If the cosmos is the outdated, feudal, patriarchal, Newtonian mechanism we’ve been brought up to believe it to be, then we really do need to have Lord Cheney of the Dark Side threatening us with the specter of hell just out of sight if we don’t do exactly as he dictates. In that realm of kinetic force uber alles, we must trust authority, we can’t trust our lying eyes.

So which is it? Which reality do we inhabit? Are we organisms, or mechanisms? Beings, or machines? Citizens, or subjects? Didn’t we settle this question at the Constitutional Convention?

It comes down to this: red pill? blue pill? red pill? blue pill? red pill!

So [Joe] turns the attack onto Greenwald and, for make weight on myself, poor lowly acolyte that I am—not because we aren’t honestly reading him and wrestling with his work but precisely because we are.