Taibbi on Klein

Most of you probably think you don’t need to read another evisceration of the buffoon Joe Klein, and you’re almost certainly correct. Still, if you’re in the mood, you could do much, much worse than Matt Taibbi’s latest offering. Amongst other strengths, Taibbi revisits Klein’s “extreme peacekeeping” nonsense from November 2003, which I recall reading with a special kind of horror at the time, but I had forgotten it was Klein who was behind it:

After sending a generation of idealistic young whippersnappers off to war in Southeast Asia with snazzy new unis, we end up killing two million people from one of the poorest agrarian countries on earth, turning huge sections of North Vietnam as well as illegally-bombed Laos and Cambodia into permanent moonscapes, and sending 60,000 Americans home in body bags, with tens of thousands more coming back crippled, poisoned, or psychologically ravaged. We furthermore let it get out that we started the war under false pretenses and kept up the fight long after even the Pentagon knew the whole thing was a hopeless waste of lives and money. Beyond that, we dump deadly poison on 5.6 million acres of a state the size of New Mexico, creating conditions that would leave every hospital in South Vietnam filling storage rooms, for the next thirty years, with two-and three-headed babies in jars. Photographers like Phillip Jones Griffiths would come back decades later with horrifying galleries of thousands of twisted genetic freaks left to lie for years on mats in malarial villages…

And yet, despite all of this, the real reason idealistic young people from the fancy classes have not been rushing into the services in the years since then is because the army isn’t offering them their own hat.

And that’s not even the best part. One of the most appalling things about our public discourse these last few years is the casual accusation by both Republican politicians and the likes of Klein–not only are we dirty fucking hippies, we’re guilty of a sort of treason of the heart. We’re not properly “rooting” for America to win. Which, as far as I can tell, consists of a sort of public tinkerbell act. Back to Taibbi:

But according to Klein, if we see a guy step off the top of the Empire State Building, we’re supposed to root for him to nail the dismount. The whole issue is irrelevant and absurd. This is a catastrophe, not a baseball game. “Rooting” is a kid’s word; grow the fuck up.