Palast is to domestic policy what Seymour Hersh is to international
policy. They are both paranoids, and their psychoses is usually
based on nothing. I've known Hersh for 41 years since he ran Gene
McCarthy's press operation in New Hampshire and then quit because the
anti-war presidential candidate was a racist. Most of his scoops
since then have been on that order of authenticity.
Palast is sloppier because he doesn't write for anyplace that
edits. At least, David Remnick at the New Yorker has
standards of credulity. This means that Hersh has to obey
someone's standards, even if they are someone else's. Palast's last
piece of hysteria was published today in the Huffington Post,
whose standards are the standards of Arianna's mouth, which are no
standards at all.
Now, I do understand the hysteria in the hard left flanks. They had
campaigned for Obama as if he were truly a comrade of Bill Ayers.
But this expectation was doomed to collapse. Yes, Obama is a
committed liberal and an idealist, to boot. But he doesn't want to
fail in world affairs which is why he recognizes that America actually
had enemies. And he doesn't want to fail in national policy he
either. Not in reconstructing our shattered economy, which explains
why he has appointed Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Paul Volcker, that
realistic symbol of financial rectitude and prudence.
I don't know whether it is true that Obama will designate Joel Klein, the
chancellor of the New York City school system, as secretary of
education. But rumor has it that Klein is one of two people -and
the more likely one, at that- whom the president-elect is going to
appoint to that post. This has driven Palast bananas.
Really bananas. Klein has no experience, says Palast.
Everything he's done with education has been a failure, Palast
continues. Yes, Klein is a reformer. And Palast comes from
that part of the left -frankly, extreme left- that is satisfied with the
ongoing tyranny of many unqualified teachers and self-satisfied
principals. If students can't be freed from these bureaucracies the
country will be indentured to functional illiteracy, virtually absolute
deficiency in quantitative skills and grotesque standards of intellectual
and moral reasoning.