Don't Mess With Howie

There is a reason we named our award for ass-kicking pundit performances here at cliffschecter.com after Howie Klein. I won't go into all the reasons why Howie is frankly one of my favorite people I have come across during my time in the burgeoning "progressive movement" (somewhere on O'Reilly's flow chart between Soros and your local Falafel King). That would take me all day.

Howie, as you may know, has helped raise lots of money for progressive candidates, and he doesn't much like being lied to by people who say they are for equal rights so he'll help raise them money, and then vote against hate crimes bills (and also refuse to talk to him when he calls to inquire about it).

That would be you Rep. Chris Carney.

Want another example? This was an email he recently sent to me and a few others (I got his permission to publish), about a column Jonah "nepotism is my middle name, baby" Goldberg wrote with the usual trite attacks on netroots folk on the left:

People in Washington read Jonah Goldberg? Why? You guys back there don't get Limbaugh or Hannity so you have to read the Rove stuff from a shill who scribbles it out for an L.A. audience that completely ignores him? Is this the same Goldberg whose mother was a prostitute and claimed she... well... did... stuff with Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and who was paid to impersonate a journalist by the Nixon campaign? If Jonah is the same one I'm thinking of, that mom also was the one who somehow got that crazy Linda Tripp woman to help set up Clinton in the Lewinsky affair. I thought Jonah just writes columns about how liberals are immoral and that he was a kind of a sissified version of Ann Coulter. Who reads him??? (Did he ever pay up after he lost his bet to Juan Cole that Iraqis would thank Bush for liberating their country?)

Don't make Howie angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry.