Oh, yes, do please read the comments, everyone. Joke is getting a very satisfactory ass-kicking. Not to be missed!

Dan beat me to it. You’re way nicer to Klein than he deserves, Auguste. Complaining about something you posted to a listserv being made public is beyond stupid.

Ah, I don’t care about the listserv, not to mention that it might stir up the whole JList bullshit again. He’s messing with a Pandagon commenter (although of course aimai is so much more ) and he can sit on that one.

I read the comments and kept waiting - and waiting, and waiting - for someone to defend him, but not a soul did.  The comments are far better than the original post.  And Dan, you’re right - #26 is priceless.

I’m kind of annoyed by Klein’s use of “woman” as a qualifier and I can’t put my finger on why.  Maybe it is because he bracketed it between two things which were meant to be less flattering—“pathetic woman acolyte”. Am I being oversensitive?

It strikes me as odd because her gender shouldn’t matter. If it had been a male acolyte of Greenwald’s, would that be substantively different?

No, PixelFish, you’re right on the money. He was name-calling. Not one of Greenwald’s readers, but one of his acolytes. Not just an acolyte, but a pathetic acolyte. Not just a pathetic acolyte, but a woman. You can’t sandwich the word “woman” between two negatives like that, especially as an adjective, and claim the misogynistic subtext is entirely inadvertent.

I’m loving this episode. And every Klein-Greenwald episode. It is that Glennzilla really bugs Joe that makes this food fight particularly delicious.

And you know what? It just struck me: Joe’s first draft was “pathetic groupie.”

And then he realized that was over-the-line and grabbed a thesaurus. “pathetic woman acolyte” is just too strange a formulation. Presumably, she’s not offering Glennzilla sexual favors for a fleeting brush with fame, so it isn’t misogynistic. See? Joe’s a good liberal.

(God, I hope for Joe’s sake he doesn’t know that Glenn is gay.)

By god, ha, you’ve got to be right on the “groupie” suggestion. Well spotted.

Aimai is Izzy Stone’s granddaughter? Whoa.

I think that is the most outstanding group of comments I’ve ever seen. Talk about ripping Joe a new one - or multiple new ones.  If only Media Whores Online were still around to comment on Joe. He would be an outstanding candidate for Media Whore of the Year.

I don’t quite understand Mr. Klein’s reasons for starting these flame wars with Glenn Greenwald. It seems that every single, solitary time he does so, he gets his ass kicked, gets smacked down, whatever you want to call it. Yet, a few months or a year later, he just goes and does it again.

It seems somewhat like a status thing, and Klein keeps pulling rank on Greenwald, keeps finding ways to call him an upstart or to say he’s not legitimate. And every single time it backfires because the internet audience dislikes Klein’s entitled attitude, and wants to tell him so.

I wonder if Klein just doesn’t read the comments, and somehow convinces himself that he “won”?

And his insult to Aimai is just a worse example of the same thing. He calls her a “pathetic woman acolyte”, to “put her in her place” which, in his own mind, apparently has a lot to do with his view of the “proper place for a woman”. Yet, in reality, Aimai is a genius writer who could write rings around Mr. Klein. It’s the same kind of status bullshit, though.

I don’t quite understand Mr. Klein’s reasons for starting these flame wars with Glenn Greenwald. It seems that every single, solitary time he does so, he gets his ass kicked, gets smacked down, whatever you want to call it. Yet, a few months or a year later, he just goes and does it again.

Oh, I’ll field that one: it’s another opportunity for Joke to play the helpless victim of those uncouth liberal bloggers, who are just too crude & uncivil to be taken seriously by the Beltway MSM.  He can now point to his comments section and wail like an infant about how MEAN these people are and garner sympathy from the rest of the Washington cocktail circuit, who will pay no attention to the substance of the commenters’ criticism as they give him a comforting pat on the shoulder.

Klein is an excellent MSM illustration:
He has demonstrated that he is no good at his very high-profile job: the sea of errors, corrections and admissions of ignorance which nonetheless preface assertions of omniscience speak for themselves.  But he is Beltway, and Time Magazine, ergo he is entitled to be right and deferred to even when he’s wrong and being schooled by somebody who isn’t mainstream.  (Though, I note, the fact that he views Glenn G as `just a blogger’ (to us a phrase) when he writes for Salon, a huge online publication, speaks volumes as to his total cluelessness.)

I wonder if Klein just doesn’t read the comments, and somehow convinces himself that he “won”?

As long as his pathetic Village acolytes tell him he’s awesome, that’s all he needs to hear.

Twice in the past month, my private communications have been splashed about the internet.

Says the author of Primary Colors.

I like comment #6.

...with footnotes[!]

So, what?  He just assumes that anything he says is “off the record” unless told otherwise?  That seems to be the standard for behavior down in the Village.

Ye Gods, what a tool.

It’s kinda terrifying to think Klein imagines that anywhere out in the universe there is an audience segment that would read his screed and think better of him after doing so. Maybe it’s a performance piece and he’s pretending to write the way he thinks “a blogger” would. Or maybe he’s trying to get out of his contract.

Holy crap, Joke’s comment thread is up to 5 pages now and the thrashing shows no signs at all of letting up. Pure comedy gold.