David Sirota Flames Joe Klein (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?)

David Sirota flames Joe Klein:

Sirotablog: Joe Klein is "all opinion and very little information" : Time Magazine's Joe Klein appeared on CNN last night and said "I bow to nobody in, in my disdain for bloggers. They're all opinions and very little information." What a truly incredible statement from person like Klein - one of America's foremost fact-averse pundits...

It is true that Joe Klein pledged on his journalistic integrity that he was not the author of Primary Colors. And it is true that Klein's "marketing campaign" for Primary Colors was an extraordinarily unethical and fraudulent case of bait-and-switch--pretend, you see, that the novel is by an insider close to Clinton, and only after the first printing reveal that it's by some jackass of a reporter.

But Sirota focuses on Klein's eagerness to, chameleonlike, change his colors--or, to put it politely, his inability to remember what he writes from one day to the next.

As Atrios sets it out, last year Klein wrote:

Joe Klein 2005 : The Schiavo case has provoked a passionate American conversation, which is taking place on a more profound level than the simple yes and no answers of the polls.... What would you do if Terri Schiavo were your daughter? Why couldn't Michael Schiavo just give custody over to the parents? What do we do about custody in a society where the parent-child bond is more durable than many marriages? The President's solution, to "err on the side of life," seems the only humane answer--if there is a dispute between parents and spouse, and the disabled person has left no clear instruction...

While this year Klein writes:

Joe Klein 2006: In fact, liberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo's family in the right-to-die case last year...