Washington Post and MSNBC pundit Ezra Klein is stinging from fellow liberal Joan Walsh’s criticism of his harsh analysis of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) rollout.
As John Nolte pointed out yesterday, Walsh did the White House’s heavy lifting and attacked Klein and others for daring to speak the obvious truth about the disastorous launch of the president’s signature legislative program:
It was predictable that the media would go nuts about this today, given that they’ve spent so much time having their noses rubbed in how insane the GOP has become, after trying so hard, for so long, to ignore it. It feels like a law of nature. Nature abhors a vacuum; media nature abhors a false-equivalence vacuum. I feel like I saw it start on Thursday, when the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, a writer I like and admire, tweeted something farcical:
Who will be more discredited this year: conservatives for pushing us to brink of default or liberals for failure of health care exchanges? …
That seemed premature to me – even a disastrous website rollout can’t be a stand-in for the entire Affordable Care Act — but of course Lizza’s pronouncement was retweeted widely and for days. The Washington Post’s great Ezra Klein then picked up the cudgel, telling the crew at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where every Obama misstep foretells the end of his presidency, that the Health and Human Services Department is covering up a massive “management failure,” because they had enough pre-launch information to know there were going to be massive problems and neither adjusted their rollout plan or prepared the public.
Klein responded to the attack via Twitter and sounded a bit like Claude Raines in Casablanca:
Kind of shocked at this piece from @joanwalsh. My job is to cover Obamacare accurately, not instrumentally. http://t.co/Naao9xWtpm
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 22, 2013
We’re shocked that Klein is shocked. He should spend some time reading Walsh and watching her appearances on MSNBC. Her entire role seems to be to run interference and be an apologist for this administration and its programs. This is the Joan Walsh view of journalism summed up in one tidy little package. And Klein dared speak the truth about the untouchable ACA. He had to be spanked.
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