Joe Klein Republican Tool

If Joe Klein was not part of the republican info structure, he would have been canned. They need him to be a sensible liberal so they can paint actual liberals as outside the mainstream. He seems to be digging his hole deeper. Glenn Greenwald has been all over him "Klein has now written five separate times about his FISA debacle, and is further away than ever from having any idea what he's even talking about" It gets better.

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 (although one doesn't need "legal background" -- just basic reading skills and a molecule of critical thought).

It seems every week or so there is an article about how real journalism is better because of editors and publishers ensure that there is appropriate fact checking. So Jane over at Firedoglake decided to track down said editor.

I’ve spent all morning on the phone trying to figure out who the editor at Time Magazine was on Joe Klein’s FISA column (the one Klein has now written about five times, fully admitting he never read the original bill). I finally confirmed that the editor was Priscilla Painton, and called her and identified myself. I asked her what the editing process was, and how a piece with so many errors made it into print.

That assumes that there are errors,” she said. And hung up on me.

Digby has a nice article about said editor. Now Rep Rush Holt one of the authors of the bill gets into the act.

As one of the bill's authors, I want to set the record straight about what's in the RESTORE Act, why it's needed to safeguard Americans from unwarranted surveillance, and ultimately, why it will lead to better intelligence gathering.

In his original column, Mr. Klein incorrectly wrote, "Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee's bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that - Limbaugh is salivating - would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only." It contains no such provision.

Now Klein could have just called the congressman himself and asked or perhaps one of his staffers but did not. He has admitted getting his info from republican staffers. I guess Kein does not feel the need to fact check them.

Glenn gets to the heart of the matter here.

It isn't enough to issue some obscure, clouded "correction" which creates the false impression there is some good faith dispute over what the House Democrats' bill does and that Klein and Painton just became understandably confused about such complex legalistic issues, all accompanied by a self-justifying, shoulder-shrugging "Hey-everyone-makes-mistakes" tone. The real story here is that Joe Klein's GOP source(s) blatantly lied to him about what this bill does in order to scare Americans into supporting George Bush's demands for greater eavesdropping powers.

Neither Klein nor Painton bothered to verify whether anything they were told was true. Instead, they mindlessly printed it with an accompanying article smearing Democrats as weak on national security and concerned with Terrorists Rights at the expense of protecting Americans.

In other words, the same corrupt propagandistic process that has driven so much of our reckless press coverage during the Bush presidency generated these outright falsehoods. How that happened and who was responsible -- as well as what Time's culpability is -- is the real story here. That is what Time has to answer. We ought to demand those answers from Stengel and Painton. It is flatly unacceptable to print outright lies as fact in order to mislead the country on such vital political matters and then refuse to account for what really happened.

Please read all the articles. It is important to understand where political stories and themes come about.