Sock Puppet Watch...
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
Mickey Kaus claims to have a mole inside Ezra Klein's Journolist, whom Mickey Kaus claims writes to him--for publication:
careerism... a very specific clique at the center of the washington journalistic ecology... an echo chamber... reified a worldview... matt yglesias and ezra were unqualified great successes... the ubiquity and centrality of ezra klein... a gateway, a common clique, the understood path... most people... didn't have real, full-time jobs... a specific social environment... ezra as a good cop, and brad delong and eric alterman and spencer ackerman etc etc as bad cops.... What it did do is boost the career of ezra klein
Let's see:
- "The ubiquity and centrality" of Ezra Klein...
- At the head of an internet listserve that is "a specific clique at the center of the washington journalistic ecology"...
- But somehow made up of people who "did not have real full-time jobs"...
By now you should smell that there is something very wrong here.
If you go and google "'Ezra Klein' Kaus site:slate.com" you get 473 results. If you start reading them, the first things you find are:
- Whippersnapper apparatchik Ezra Klein...
- health care cheerleader Ezra Klein...
- Ezra Klein, concern troll...
- Ezra Klein, unreliable narrator...
- With friends like Ezra Klein...
- Ezra Klein's most cracked spin yet...
- Is Ezra Klein the new William F. Buckley or the new Tim Russert, helping establish the boundaries of what's respectably thinkable?...
- Ezra Klein seems particularly disingenuous...
- Ezra Klein a "young punk toeing the Bob Kuttner line cluelessly"...
- Is Ezra Klein young enough to be this pompous?...
It is clear that Ezra Klein is indeed ubiquitous and central--in the mind of Mickey Kaus.
A 59-year-old man who has decided to spend a large chunk of his career hating on a 26-year-old has already ridden the insanity bus to its final stop. What are the odds that there is a second person equally crazy? Who equally believes that Ezra Klein is ubiquitous and central? Is at the center of the Washington journalist ecology? And what are the odds then that this second person conceals his loathing for Ezra? And then that Ezra likes this second person? And that this person then decides to unburden his loathing of Ezra to... Mickey Kaus?
I am compelled to believe that Kaus simply made this up--that his claim to have received this email should be treated as as likely to be true as William Bennett's claim that he was not down $7,000,000 but had instead "broken even" in Las Vegas over the years. One crazy person I have the evidence of my eyes to attest for. But two sharing the same delusions? It is just too much for me to credit.
Occam's razor...
