The American Pundit

Allahpundit can’t quite believe that Joe Klein would mean it the way it sounds. Why not? Klein isn’t exactly the epitome of class and doesn’t seem to mind being a crass to degrade others. Again, we’re talking about Joe Klein of Newsweek here. Even as a liberal he’s managed to get civil rights groups to criticize his remarks.

“He became Ground Zero among the neo-cons, but he’s vastly smarter than most of them,” said Time’s Joe Klein, an admirer and critic who praised Krauthammer’s “writing skills and polemical skills” as “so far above almost anybody writing columns today.”

“There’s something tragic about him too,” Klein said, referring to Krauthammer’s confinement to a wheelchair, the result of a diving accident during his first year of medical school. “His work would have a lot more nuance if he were able to see the situations he’s writing about.”

“My writing speaks for itself,” Krauthammer responded in a curt email.

Even forgetting the crassness, the statement makes no sense. As John Podhoretz writes:

We cannot go back in time and visit the battlefields of the Civil War, or Agincourt, or the Peloponnese—are we therefore incapable of seeing their nuances? FDR was in a wheelchair and did not visit the battlefields of World War II-—were its nuances beyond him as well?

The self-infatuation this quote reveals about Klein’s own celebration of his own passport stamps—the words of a lesser author and thinker about one who so surpasses him in clarity and insight that a wiser Klein would have been better off just admitting that he can’t hold a candle to Krauthammer and let it go at that—is striking enough. But let’s face it. This is simply disgusting, no matter how you slice it. Perhaps men and women in wheelchairs, or who are blind, or deaf, or have other infirmities that make their ability to get on a plane and go to Iraq should simply forbear any sort of opinion about such things. They should, instead, be left to Joe Klein.

Klein would love to label Krauthammer as a chickenhawk, but that’s impossible based on the latter’s physical condition. Therefore, Klein attempts to explain away Krauthammer’s views as the inability to see the nuances and realities of the world due to disability in a bit of faux sympathy. The chickenhawk argument against a paralyzed man, basically.

Stay classy, Joe.