A late kick in the backside for Time Magazine Columnist Joe Klein:

On or about April 11th 2006 Joe Klein was quoted as saying the predicting doom for the democratic party this fall for the following reason:
"if their message is that they hate America -- which is what has been the message of the liberal wing of the party for the past twenty years."

Well, as liberal I am as patriotic as the next guy....I love America with all the fulsome sincerity of one of Richard Nixon's Cuban manservants.
But Humble Elias freely admits to hating Joe Klein with a genial ferocity.
And in truth, there is much there to hate.
The smugness, the cliches tarted up as lonely iconoclasm and the tendency to conflate lackeydom with heroism...all regualr features of the Kleinian bibliography.
Joe calls himself with swinging iconoclasm, a "radical moderate", but as Humble Elias has pointed out before, moderation is broken because movement conservatism is broken beyong repair.
This hasn't prevented the conservative movement from ruthlessly organizing Washington DC like a 19th century factory town, indeed a hallmark of conservative declinism is it's ability to continually acculmulate power even as it airly tramples all over it's own sacred tenets.
One of movement conservatism's singular triumphs has been the complete political isolation of American Liberalism...leaving the alleged moderates to negotiate national policy alone and without recourse.
Faced with an unfavorable situation and reluctant to seek recourse electorally, Klein's radical moderation has opted for six long years of toadying capitulationism.
There is no middle, the middle has become the captive of the right.
Klein keeps insisting there is a happy mean in US politics but without countervailing pressure from the left, the moderate course is naught but a certain pleading tone of voice.
Klein doesn't understand that, he like so many others thinks it is still 1997 where real bargains could still be struck. Six years of unlimited power though has made unfaithful negotiating partners of movement conservatism.

It is an axiom on this blog that we in the USA are on the brink of something Humble Elias like to call "post conservative civilization" wherein the forms & symbols of conservative governance will go on whilst the movement's principles will be sent to a hospice to expire in peace.
This is not a political situation that can be sustained over the long run neither is this is a Schlesingerian prediction of the coming liberal eschaton. We may play no part in what happens next, that depends though on our own ideas and our own willingness to play a very rough game indeed.
As for Joe Klein?
He'll be forgotten by then, he is too spineless and too chained to past to rise to the challenge.

Okay good, got that one done...