aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Defending Klein’s readers. Sort of.

There are plenty of good criticisms of Klein’s Hillary-hating book. I particularly like Media Matters’ coverage. I enjoyed David Remnick’s Political Porn. I also pointed to conservative criticism of Klein. But much as I’m a Morbo fan, his comments on Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column go too far:

For a long time I have resisted believing that right-wingers are, on average, dumber than progressives. It sounds so elitist and feeds Red State paranoia. But I think Cohen has a point. To paraphrase his position, only a bunch of idiots would buy the same book over and over again. Only idiots would fail to realize that when a book has absolutely no data backing up its claims, it is suspect.

Yet the right-wing publishing syndicate routinely cranks out books like this and sell them by the millions. And only idiots could stand to read such books.

Now it’s not that I think the people reading the book are brilliant, rather it is that I’m sure that we’ve got a good many people on the left so hungry for bashing conservatives that they’d buy up leftist trash. I know some looney lefties myself. Then there’s all those Americans who read grocery store check-out line literature.

A while back I quoted Kevin Drum on his quest to find “the really famous and genuinely influential books of the past 200 years that liberals dislike as much as conservatives dislike Keynes and Kinsey.” It’s kind of the same, but different. Now that’s a question I think is good and fair.