Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Time Magazine Edition)
Glenn Greenwald:
Joe Klein digs Time's hole deeper still: Joe Klein has just posted yet again about his FISA confusion, and it has now moved well beyond farce into an almost pity-inducing realm. If Time has any dignity at all, someone there will intervene and put a stop to this. It's actually difficult to watch.
In the last five days alone, Klein has now written five separate times about his FISA debacle... first was the column itself; second was the Swampland post the same day in which he emphatically defended the accuracy of what he wrote... third was the post yesterday in which Klein said he "may have made a mistake in [his] column this week about the FISA legislation"... fourth was an Update he added to that post this morning claiming that he did speak to a Democrat but "may have misinterpreted a Democratic source's point"... his fifth effort... in which he still professes confusion after "spen[ding] the past few days nosing around in the ongoing dispute about what the House FISA Reform bill actually says." The result of all this "nosing around": "I've reached no conclusions." And he then unleashes this: "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right."
That's been the point all along.... I now know who Klein's editor for this piece was and I will have much more to say about all of this tomorrow.... I just want to ask that everyone ponder the extreme lack of professionalism and corruption required for someone like Klein to write the article that he did accusing Democrats of wanting to give Terrorists the same rights as Americans (therefore showing, as always, that Democrats can't be trusted on national security), and then -- once he is exposed for having spewed outright falsehoods -- he announces that he really isn't interested in bothering to find out (and isn't even capable of determining) if anything he wrote was accurate....
Doesn't it go without saying: if Klein doesn't have the time or background to understand what he's writing about, then he ought not to write about it? Doesn't anyone at Time agree with that?...
