Kerry's a better jokester than Jeff Greenfield

Bob Somerby (The Daily Howler) lays some serious heat on Jeff Greenfield and the journalism establishment – for Greenfield’s disingenuous reaction to a blogger bombardment for his absurd “joke” on CNN. The "joke" was about Obama’s name and supposed sartorial sympathies with the Iranian President (whose name is impossible to spell) -- i.e., reminiscent of the "earthtones" issue besieging Al Gore in 2000.

Since some point in the Clinton-Gore years, the American discourse has been so amazingly bad that it truly does boggle the mind. For that reason, the discourse has been hard to describe—and it has often been hard for observers to grasp how cosmically awful it has been. But let’s say this, about a bit of our history: By the spring and fall of 1999, Jeff Greenfield’s journalistic cohort had essentially lost its mind. In the past few years, we’ve searched for metaphors to describe the work they did in that period, especially during the twenty months of Campaign 2000, the period on which we’ve done the bulk of our work. But the metaphor of the group nervous breakdown is a fairly good place to start. Nothing they’re doing at the present time is nearly as crazy as what they did then. But their conduct back then was virally crazy, and it plainly sent George Bush to the White House. That said, we liberals and Dems would be out of our minds to sit back while it started again.

It’s very hard to explain the insanity of the Campaign 2000 wardrobe criticism. The human mind simply isn’t built to comprehend such lunatic conduct—conduct whose consequences are now clear. But Greenfield surely knows what happened, and he surely knows why he was yelled at this week. It was a very good thing when Josh Marshall yelled—we wish he’d offered the fuller context—and there was no reason to ask poor Jeff what he meant by his dumb comments. Democrats and liberals would be out of their minds to let this sort of thing start again.