Deep Read: 'Radar' on Joe Klein

It's open season on Joe Klein, the Time pundit who botched the facts in a column about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, then performed a shuck-and-jive rather than just admit his mistake.

Radar's John Cook sees the episode as a perfect synecdoche for Klein's tenure in the commentariat. "Klein's body of work amounts to little more than a festival of projection and poorly disguised vanity," he ventures.

"There is no better conceivable foil than he for the blogocentric criticism that the political journalism establishment is populated by preening, clueless, lazy, and pompous regurgitators of conventional wisdom."

The various defenses Klein has penned in response to the FISA episode, says Cook, "are precious goldmines of self-aggrandizing pretense that must be savored at length to appreciate their rich subtleties and overtones." Zeroing in on Klein's beg-off that "I have neither the time nor the legal background to figure out who's right," Cook calls it "one of the finest specimens of sheer journalistic hubris ever issued from one of the genre's most accomplished practitioners.... I don't have time find out if what I write is true, people! I'm too busy claiming that other things are true. And even if I did have time, I'm not qualified to say whether the things I write are true anyway!"

For the record, I used to work for Radar and still occasionally contribute, so feel free to accuse me of logrolling. Also for the record, the whole FISA debacle aside, I generally find Klein's commentary far more worthwhile than that of his Time stablemate, Mark Halperin. But a well-written takedown is always a pleasure.

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