Yesterday, I wrote about a New York Magazine article by Kurt Andersen, in which Andersen called for the elite class to rule our country. Just throw a few bones to the noisy rabble and they will pipe down, he suggested.
Joe Klein, who fancies himself a member of the elite media class, loved Andersen’s article. Writing on his blog Swampland (which accurately describes the level of his opinions), Klein praised the:
excellent essay by Kurt Andersen, tying together many of the threads about the ugly and recalcitrant nature of populism that I’ve been posting on in recent days.
Joe’s bogeymen are “anti-elitism” and “anti-intellectualism” which inspire, in Joe’s words, “a suspicion and hatred of The Other.”
He names two of the worst offenders of his intellectual, elitist sensibilities:
Those, like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, who seek to exploit these fears now stand on the shoulders of…pygmies.
As I have said before, Joe Klein is doing a disservice to those of us who happen to share his name. He is an elitist, to be sure, but he is an intellectual pretender. People who are serious about ideas do not continually engage in childish name-calling, but that is Klein’s stock-in-trade.
I am a Harvard Law school graduate who studied constitutional law under the late Watergate prosecutor Professor Archibald Cox. I guess that would make me eligible for membership in Swampland Joe Klein’s club of elite intellectuals. But I am the Newsrealblog Joe Klein who believes that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have articulated a better understanding of the philosophy of the Founding Fathers towards limited government and how that philosophy should be applied to current problems than the club of elite intellectuals have been able to do.
If my namesake would like to debate this proposition intelligently, bring it on.
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