Health Care BS

Ezra Klein’s specialty when he began blogging at TAP back in 2007 was health care, and you will be hard put to find a more prolific writer of dumb reform posts. Nonetheless, that continued to be his primary focus after his ascent to the Washington Post. But stupidity is a kind of birth defect, and one should make allowances.

It is, however, harder to forgive Klein’s mean-spirited dishonesty. This tawdry trait came to the fore at the height of the Obamacare debate, when he accused Joe Lieberman of wanting to kill hundreds of thousands of people for political revenge, a charge he based on a famously faulty study that even Klein isn’t dumb enough to believe. 

Even worse is Journolist—-a listserv founded by Klein and used by hundreds of lefty journalists to coordinate pro-Obama, pro-Democrat agitprop. The Post canned blogger David Weigel for his slimy remarks on Journolist. Why is its founder still there, offering this hopelessly lame excuse for refusing to release the Journolist archives?

Why don’t I just release all the e-mails? — the answer is that I still believe people have the right to assume privacy when they send e-mails to an off-the-record list.

This doesn’t pass the laugh test. Does anyone believe that a man who would accuse Joe Lieberman of wishing death upon hundreds of thousands is actually concerned about “privacy”? Klein is obviously sitting on the Journolist archives because he knows they expose the utter corruption of the American “news” media as well as his own culpability.

Ezra Klein should be fired. But, as Byron York points out, the Post is not merely allowing him to stay, its management is stonewalling real journalists who call with questions. Which begs the following question: Is the Post afraid to fire Klein because he might retaliate by releasing the archives? How many Post “reporters” are sweating tonight over this?

UPDATE:

Andrew Breitbart also want to know why there are no firings for behavior that, by any rational measure, is incredibly unethical:

I’m trying to end JournoList collusion that goes well beyond … Ezra Klein’s 400 friends and collaborators, and that includes Politico and Bloomberg. Where are they firing people? Where are the questions about this monumental act of journalistic fraud? Where are the mass firings?

The dearth of firings is is particularly ironic considering that MSM journalists are constantly gassing about government ethics (GOP ethics, that is).

[ht Riehl World View]