Joe Klein Thinks You're Stupid

In fact, Joe Klein thinks that everybody in the world is stupid except for himself, and those who agree with him. How else to explain Klein's latest, self-contradictory partisan potshot at the Bush Administration?

Klein wants the US deeply involved in the current war between Israel and Iranian/Syrian-backed terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas. It matters not to Monsieur Klein that past involvement has accomplished little more than to get America branded "Great Satan" and made the target of terrorist attacks beginning early in the Clinton Administration, as well as emboldening and empowering terrorist thugs like Hamas. Like a good liberal, Klein judges intentions more than results, and prefers to treat symptoms while allowing the underlying disease to fester.

But before Klein gets to his crackpot criticism of Bush's hands-off approach to the current conflict, Klein obligingly explains why Klein is full of crap:

If this was an Ahmadinejad ploy, it might well backfire. The Israeli response has seriously damaged Lebanon economically. The Lebanese patchwork of constituencies that governs the country may now conclude that it can no longer tolerate a heavily armed Hizballah substate in the south. And if it can be proved that Iran instigated the mess, the members of the U.N. Security Council might be nudged toward a tougher stance on the nuclear issue—and the threat of international sanctions, which could have terrible consequences for Iran's oily economy.

Now, a writer driven by intellect, rather than emotion, would have looked at this half paragraph and concluded that it argued convincingly against his own thesis. And, once that was realized, this not-Klein might have decided that it was mind-numbingly stupid to continue to attack a foreign policy tactic obviously based on this same analysis.

The inescapable conclusion is that Klein thinks you are too stupid to realize that he has mortally weakened his own argument, and he might as well make himself boil in his pants by throwing some gratuitous insults at the President. That's what thinking of yourself as an elite will do for you.

Cross-posted at The Jawa Report.