Politico's Michael Calderone bucks the establishment and blows the lid off "JournoList," the secret society/ messageboard of the DC liberal media elite. He uncovered this far-reaching conspiracy with the twin investigative tactics of, 1) reading about it in Mickey Kaus' blog two years ago, and 2) talking to his three co-workers who are in the club.

We kid! Calderone did a public service simply by exposing, publicly, the fact that the cream of DC wonkdorkery may be in danger of imploding under the weight of their own self-importance. JournoList is sort of a sympathy club for those too liberal to get into Skull and Bones. Jeff Toobin and Eric Alterman and Joe Klein and DC's finest blogerati are on the list, but everything on there is off the record:

"It's sort of a chance to float ideas and kind of toss them around, back and forth, and determine if they have any value," said New Republic associate editor Eve Fairbanks, "and get people's input on them before you put them on a blog."

Ha, around here we do the exact opposite! Now allow us to share with you a quote from supremely self-satisfied liberal Eric Alterman:

"For me, it's enormously useful because I don't like to spend my time reading blogs and reading up-to-the-minute political minutia," he said.

He only likes to spend his time writing blogs and up-to-the-minute political minutia. Finally, professional idiot Joe Klein sums it all up:

But Time's Joe Klein, who acknowledged being on JList and several other listservs, said in an e-mail that "they're valuable in the way that candid conversations with colleagues and experts always are." Defending the off-the-record rule, Klein said that "candor is essential and can only be guaranteed by keeping these conversations private."

And then Klein - speaking like the JLister he is - said there wasn't "anything more that I can or want to say about the subject."

JournoList is the adult diaper of the liberal media world, soaking up the bullshit before it reaches the outside world. Carry on! [Politico]

Klein asked the Republican nominee a pointed question about Iran in June (when the ban started) and has been generally disdainful of McCain's campaign tactics lately. So now he's a leftist wingnut, and not the DLC-aping centrist often accused — from the left! — of smugly disdaining the liberal wing of the Democratic party and mindlessly transcribing conventional wisdom. Excellent job reminding everyone how conservative your critics have become, McCain campaign. And how bad you are at message control.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician's lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

But now, John McCain lies. And it's not like 2000, when John McCain lied about loving the confederate flag and then apologized for lying, because back then he'd wink to Richard Cohen every time he did it, so Rich knew it was just a thing he had to do, this lying.

Anyway, Rich, your column went over great with Joe Klein, who is pretty much just like you except he writes for Time.

So that's two useless moderate bearded columnists off the straight talk express! Who's next?

Wait, David Brooks? No, wait, he just doesn't like Sarah Palin anymore. Because she's not a comfortable entrenched establishment conservative like David Brooks, but rather a scary culture war populist idiot, like Bush.

And, of course, Andrew Sullivan—once a gay Catholic right-winger (well, honestly, still those things in his head) who wanted to kill all the Muslims and accused liberal journalists of being in league with the terrorists right after 9/11—never wastes an opportunity to point out that John McCain has lost his respect (we're sure that keeps the senator up at night).

Of course we're being unfair in only listing people we never liked. (JK Andrew, you've grown on us.) Ana Marie Cox likes McCain—for that openness and access that Rich Cohen pretends not to care about!—but she has been critical of his campaign, lately (though she scored a late-August interview with the candidate—just before the Palin selection!) And Jon Stewart had McCain on his Daily Show more often than any other guest. But during the RNC the show produced what is maybe the most damning and mean indictment of the man's entire biography we've ever seen.

To sum up: in 2000 John McCain learned that making friends with the media does not win elections, and this year he may yet learn that pissing them off has no consequences.

• John McCain took an idiotic and offensive stand for the purposes of political expediency.
• John McCain pretended to believe in this thing but secretly didn't, or maybe vice versa.
• John McCain felt the need to then secretly apologize for this to his best buddies in the press.
• They felt his apology to them was more sincere than his stated stand to the idiot commoner voters.
• They probably felt the apology was as "honorable" as his "honorable" campaign.
• No one mentioned any of this until now, eight years later.

This is why Barack Obama is an elitist and the press is in the tank for him.

You might also remember “The Israel Lobby” from its expanded version as an eponymous book with the aesthetics of the Israeli and American flags interwoven and which drew universally hostile reviews on both the left and the right (when’s the last time you can remember the Nation sort of agreeing with Commentary?), as well from both the neoconservative and “realist” schools of foreign policy. Those who didn’t speculate as to Mearsheimer and Walt’s tenebrous motives concluded that their scholarship was mostly fifth-rate, and that their reasoning was just as good.

The loud and angry chorus quietened to a murmuring panel discussion after Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations came to the cool-headed determination: “Their use of evidence is uneven. At the level of geopolitics, their handling of the complex realities and crosscurrents of the Middle East fails to establish either the incontestable definition of the national interest that their argument requires or the superiority they claim for the policies they propose.”

But Mearsheimer and Walt’s biggest problem was a category one: They depicted the “lobby” as encompassing every strain of opinion with respect to Israel, thus nullifying its definition as an undifferentiated, monomaniacal force. Had they written a book entitled Jews Argue, they’d have sold fewer copies but made much the same underlying point. As Mead put it: “Since virtually every possible policy position is supported by some element of this lobby, the lobby never loses no matter what happens in Washington — like the man who always ‘wins’ at roulette because he puts a chip on every square.”

Of course, the only real “lobby” the pair wound up calling attention to was the self-martyrdom one run by simpering intellectuals. Dare criticize the Jewish state, goes a certain kind of reverse messianic logic, and you’ll never work in this town again. Not many reviewers denounced Mearsheimer and Walt as anti-Semites, at least not in public; Mead said they stupidly trafficked in all the wrong tropes, but probably out of illiteracy and ignorance—they certainly weren’t aware of much Middle Eastern and American history, so this rationale didn’t seem willfully naive. Yet those who did denounce them as Jew-haters were held up as proof of one part of their shoddy grievance; namely, that a contingent of powerful and influential Jews and Christians are always standing guard to protect not only the sanctity of the American-Israeli special relationship, but to deny that such a protection even exists.

Strange, then, that even the putative “victims” of AIPAC don’t seem all that victimized. Mearsheimer and Walt are both still gainfully employed academics, and the fact that the present documentary isn't airing on U.S. television owes to how irrelevant and old the controversy has become, which fact hasn't stopped the inevitable whispers about a backroom censorship campaign. Was it censorship when the essay and book were being blogged and written about ad nauseum in every magazine and newspaper in the country, and eliciting puzzled laughter from Israelis, who could never quite see what all the fuss was about?

Tony Judt, one of Mearsheimer and Walt's more mainstream boosters, who whether by accident or design looks more and more like Isaac Babel, parlayed his defense of them into an occasion for a good headline-grabbing whine. An invitation issued to him to speak at the Polish consulate in New York was rescinded after Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League placed a hectoring phone call to the little sliver of Warsaw on the Hudson and reminded whoever was in charge that Judt had some provocative ideas about the future of Israel. Yet that same Polish government, as Judt indicates in this documentary, is “not very attractive” and therefore prone to take decisions he would not agree with—like informing Tony Judt that his speaking services are no longer required. He now discloses that when the New York Times commissioned him to write an op-ed on the original London Review article, the paper forced him to acknowledge in print that he was Jewish. Judt might have declined to do that on principle and instead shopped his piece around elsewhere, but he didn't. Is his point that no one gets away clean from the tentacular reaches of the lobby, which is still not a "conspiracy," as his editorial plangently announced in its title?

As for Foxman, his campaign to stifle the introduction of a House resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide –- because he was afraid it’d piss off Turkey, Israel’s only military ally in the Levant –- failed. They don’t make Zionist praetorians like they used to, I guess. (I should probably add here that, in my capacity as associate editor of Jewcy magazine, I helped coordinate two Manhattan rallies against Foxman and the ADL for their shameful agitation. It still wasn’t enough to take me off their fucking mailing list.)

Then there is the more recent case of Joe Klein. On Time’s Swampland blog last week, he composed a post entitled “Surge Protection,” which made some mundane observations about the state of security in Iraq (it’s better), but then ended with this hiccup:

The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives—people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary—plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.

The little diddums. Klein must have known that would call down the Hebraic thunder, and it did. As best I can tell, he was doing what he’s been doing since he learned how to blog and read virulent comments, many of which routinely brand him a neocon warmonger — he was pandering. Not that there aren’t prominent Jewish neoconservatives who plumped for war, mind you. But it was the crankish types who keep track of such tribal affiliations that “raised the question of divided loyalties," whereas Richard Perle would no doubt have preferred the question remain recumbent.

The curious thing about Klein, though is, as Mickey Kaus noted, “It's now a week later, and as far as I can tell [he] still has his job. He's still blogging (wondering ‘why Lieberman is so fixated on Iran’). He hasn't been publically rebuked by his employer. He hasn't been forced to issue a groveling apology.”

Mary McCarthy once wrote an eloquent and vigorous defense of Hannah Arendt, and described the effect of being one of the few Gentiles in conversation with Jews where the topic was Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt's molten treatment of the "banality of evil" that burned its way through the salons of the Upper West Side in the early 60’s. McCarthy said it was “like [being] a child with a reading defect in a class of normal readers.”

You can be Jewish and sometimes feel that way, too.

[Huffington Post, Ephemerist]

• Joe was like, the Demon-crats want American courts to approve investigations of foreign terrorists!
• Then Glenn and everyone was just like "It just does not."
• Then Joe made it worse! And Glenn was all "what country do you live in?"
• And then Glenn was like "Time Magazine has done a superb service for the country by illustrating everything that is rancid and corrupt with our political media." MEOW.
• And Time put up a pretty iffy correction.
• And Joe was like shrug, I don't really know anything and can't figure this out.
• And the pitchfork-hoisting mob was like CRUCIFY HIM CRUCIFY HIM. Which is sort of a good point!
• Now poor Joe can't blog at all without his comments sections being taken over by calls for his big mistaken head!
• Except one commenter was like:

  It's already a win-win for Time. The controversy drives extra traffic to Swampland. But all the extra eyeballs here are people who already know Joe is wrong and why. In the meantime, the print edition will "cover the controversy" and in exactly the same way that Genesis gets promoted to a reasonable scientific theory in classrooms, The RW misrepresentations will get elevated to a plausable alternative to the actual text of the bill. And Joe doesn't get laughed off the playground by his DLC buddies.

• Which is definitely a good point.

"Everyone is having great fun trying to pick out who the characters are modeled after and who the writer is. Beyond that, there is absolutely nothing to care about except to wonder idly how an internationally bestselling writer and a well-known agent could have put together such a resoundingly flagrant piece of utter crap without realizing (or maybe just without caring) how crappy it actually is. Also, the sex scenes are really really terrible," this insider tells us.

So, uh, who is who? "I suspect that one of the agent characters is modeled on Nicole Aragi and there are a couple characters who none of us can quite settle on but Gary Fisketjon and Morgan Entrekin have come up. Some might also be UK agents/editors. I would easily buy the theory that Elizabeth Sheinkman is the author." Oh, and Gunn has offered to buy dinner at the Ivy for anyone correctly guessing the authors! Everybody totally put on your sleuthing caps.

Gunn Opens Fire [Publishing News]