BTC News » John Harris begs Mark Halperin to shut up

BTC News » John Harris begs Mark Halperin to shut up: “John Harris begs Mark Halperin to shut up
Filed under: Weldon’s Page Eat the Press— Weldon Berger @ 10:54 am
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Mark Halperin and John Harris, co-authors of The Way to Win, are participating this week in Slate’s “Breakfast Club” feature. Halperin is the political director at ABC News; Harris is his opposite number at the Washington Post. The “Breakfast Club” is a feature in which two or more luminaries in one field or another politely agree or disagree with one another on, with few exceptions, various irrelevancies. This week’s edition is mildly exceptional in that they’re discussing an issue of some import — the impact of the national political press on elections — and that Harris keeps telling Halperin, politely, to shut up about their book.
The reason Harris wants Halperin to shut up is that during the course of his promotion tour for the book, Halperin has courted right-wing talk and radio hosts and in so doing has disintegrated into a 10-year-old boy begging the bullies to like him. Glenn Greenwald has the awful details of Halperin’s behavior with right-wing talker Hugh Hewitt — the worst example to date, but not the only — which Billmon likens to the desperate self-criticism sessions common in Soviet Russia and vividly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
It isn’t just Halperin’s character or his ability to provide rational coverage of politics in this country that his courtship of Hewitt, and Sean Hannity before, calls into question: it’s his mental acuity. At one point he tells Hewitt that “I am beginning to think you are intellectually dishonest on a few points.” He is, mind you, writing to a man whose very trade is intellectual dishonesty”