Michelle takes a baseball bat to Ezra Klein, today.
A good-faith debate would require that Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein actually be a person of good faith. He is treated as such in some elite conservative circles, where his work is linked frequently and intellectual repartee among the Beltway boys’ club is warm and chummy. He is free to continue traveling in those cozy circles where highbrow right-wingers are not so mean and scary.
But I’d just as soon share a stage, physical or virtual, with Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein as I would with Chris Matthews, Geraldo Rivera, or an overflowing vat of liquid radioactive waste.
I’ve had similar comments about the man in these spaces for some time now. As an example:
The man turned himself into an apologist for the left, and found that ditching his integrity by the side of the road to do it was necessary . One simply cannot make the arguments he makes, without doing so.
Michelle, however, takes it to the house:
First, let’s bust the cherished myth that Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein is as brilliant as he, the nutroots, and his respectable conservative friends think he is.
He is proudly touting the discovery of a blog post I wrote about my experience with Maryland’s individual health insurance market in 2004. He excerpts this part:
I have commented before on the problems with central planning in health care. I certainly am not convinced that a government-run system is the answer, but I do agree with Krugman that there are serious problems with our health insurance system, particularly in the market for individually-purchased (non-group) coverage.
After my husband quit his job earlier this year (to become a full-time stay-at-home dad), we had a choice. We could either buy health insurance from his former employer through a program called COBRA at a cost of more than $1,000 per month(!) or we could go it alone in Maryland’s individual market. Given our financial circumstances, that “choice” wasn’t much of a choice at all. We had to go on our own.
We discovered that the most generous plans in Maryland’s individual market cost $700 per month yet provide no more than $1,500 per year of prescription drug coverage-a drop in the bucket if someone in our family were to be diagnosed with a serious illness.
With health insurance choices like that, no wonder so many people opt to go uninsured.
What he fails to excerpt is the rest of the post:
In the end, we decided to purchase a very high-deductible plan (sold by Golden Rule Insurance Co.) coupled with a tax-sheltered Medical Savings Account (MSA). We couldn’t qualify for the preferred rate because Golden Rule says I am underweight. Hmph! In any case, while Krugman and most Democrats don’t seem to like MSAs, in our case we were glad they were an option.
Update: The Times reports that the proportion of Americans without health insurance is on the rise. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, says the proportion has remained steady. (Both are right; it depends on which timeframe one is talking about.) The WSJ editorial writers suggest:
States like New York could do a lot for [those who cannot obtain health insurance] merely by getting rid of the state insurance regulations that make a basic policy roughly 10 times more expensive than it is in neighboring Connecticut. Better still, Congress could save poor New Yorkers from the tyranny of Albany by putting an end to our Balkanized and anachronistic 50-state insurance market and simply decreeing that there shall be nationwide commerce in health insurance. They could then buy policies issued in saner states or over the Internet.
Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein and his Pavlovian (Yet Respectable) boosters are treating my 2004 post as proof-positive of my utterly flabbergasting HYPOCRISY!
Look! The wingnut complained about the health insurance market! Ergo, she is a HYYYYPPPPOCRITE. And stupid! And a Nazi bitch!
Continue flinging your peas. I do have a spit shield now.
Grown-ups, on the other hand, will be able to grasp effortlessly that if I had decided not to buy private insurance and then demanded that the government cover my medical expenses and insure me after a catastrophic accident, then, yes, why, yes, you could flap two HYPOCRISY! cards up and down in each hand until your feet lifted off the ground.
In fact, I advocated MSAs and noted approvingly the Wall Street Journal’s suggestion that the cure for limited market choices was less government intervention. Not more.
This is perfectly consistent, in other words, with my INHUMAN, FASCIST, CAPITALIST, WINGNUT views.
This is actually fairly standard fare when dealing with Klein. Taking notice of the inconsistencies, and the omissions of Klein’s ravings, has become something of a national sport of late. There’s certainly enough of each to go around. Invariably, Klein will support larger government. He will claim that’s not what he’s about, but the pattern becomes clear after only a short period of time. If he notices that pattern himself, he doesn’t have the integrity to make mention of it, much less adjust away from the problem. No shock, we labeled him here, quite a while ago, as not having the ability… such is, after all, modern leftism, today. If he were to step away from such inconsistencies, and he would cease being Liberal… the former, being part and parcel of the latter.
But what really catches my attention, is this passage:
True to form, however, other Respectable Liberal Bloggers are mindlessly promoting Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein’s discovery of my observations as the Holy Grail of Hypocrisy Cards-and falsely characterizing my post to boot. Respectable Liberal Blogger Jonathan Cohn at TNR’s The Plank claims that “I couldn’t find health insurance” and that “there was no affordable coverage to be had.”
Reading comprehension grade: F.
Nutroots pandering grade: A+ with an unhinged smiley face!
Yes, but it is the consensus. You may remember we discussed consensus, and the echo chamber thereof, and, it’s damaging effects, the other day. It would appear that this is yet another one of those situations where the consensus is that fire is not hot, and you’re not going to tell anyone of these people any different…. even when the true facts of the matter are in the source material they are quoting.
And let’s address this issue of respectability that Michelle brings up; On the whole, I think if liberals actually found me respectable, I would consider my credibility highly suspect. As it is, I think it’s intact. Certainly, so is that of Michelle, too. Meanwhile….
Message Ezra Klein: Have the courage and integrity to step out of the leftist echo chamber, Ezra, and out into the real world.
Others: Riehl World View, Wizbang, RCP
Tags: Democrats, healthcare issues, Idiots, other blogs/bloggers, Whacko-Left
