July 30th, 2013
An interesting observation from Galley Reader X:
So this is interesting: In a one-week period both Ezra Klein and Annie Lowrey published pieces reporting that Larry Summers’s friends, who want him to replace Bernanke as the Fed Chairman, have started a sexist “whispering campaign” against the other top contender, Janet Yellen.
Neither story actually cites evidence of such a “campaign.” In Ezra’s article, which came out first, his only example was a two-month old quote from Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher. According to Ezra, Fisher said that if Yellen were to get nominated to succeed Bernanke, then the pick would be “driven by gender.”
Now, invoking Fisher as part of a coordinated pro-Summers campaign is pretty absurd in and of itself, because Fisher is a very hot critic of a lot of what Larry Summers stands for.
But what was even better was when Mrs. Klein tried to use the same Fisher quote in her own front-page NYT story a couple days ago: the Times had to quickly issue a correction, bluntly saying that Lowrey (and, implicitly, Klein) had taken the quote out of context:
An article on Friday about Janet L. Yellen and Lawrence H. Summers as possible successors to Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve omitted context for a quotation from Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. In an interview earlier this year on CNBC, Mr. Fisher said of a potential choice to replace Mr. Bernanke: “It’s a presidential decision, and we’ll see if it is driven by gender or other considerations and so on. Janet is extremely capable. There are other capable people.” He did not say simply that a decision to choose Ms. Yellen would be “driven by gender.”If there’s a “whispering campaign” going on, it’s not between Summers’s anti-Yellen buddies. It’s between the Kleins, and whoever’s urging them to push the Summers’-friends-are-sexist storyline.
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Someone isn’t getting invited to Trivial Pursuit Night!
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Is there anyone who still believes Klein is anything beyond a hack propagandist? A few years ago Democrats touted him as an “expert on health care” when all he did was become a master of talking points and using factoids to mislead. Notice they don’t turn to him so much now that the wheels are coming off that bus.
Before that, there was a contingent of the Short Pants Brigade at NRO who promoted Klein as “a reasonable leftist with whom we can have an honest debate” as if they had ever met a leftist who was either honest or reasonable. Klein, like their other Fave Rave Yglesisas, proved to be neither.
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I personally want to see Micky keep staking that amnesty corpse, if only because the GOP leadership has yet to prove that they can be kept from playing with dead things…
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The main reason why I’ve come to doubt the sanity of the “DC Libertarian” is the amount of pixels spilled debunking their liberal friends’ arguments; anyone who thinks Klein and Yglesias intellectually honest is incapable of recognizing reality.
These same people dismiss Rush Limbaugh as a shock jock.
Nick Shaw September 18, 2013 at 3:38 pm
Someone “urging” Ezra and wife to push the “Summers’ friends are sexist line”?
Gee, I wonder who that could be?
That Ezra would get a quote and actual allegiance wrong is a given.