Chuck Lane of the Washington Post Is an Unhappy Camper…

Chuck Lane writes:

Incivility rewarded: @johnpodesta picks sneering, rancorous @delong to blog for his new inequality think tank

— Charles Lane (@ChuckLane1) December 12, 2013

Hmmm… Did I run over Chuck Lane’s dog? What have I said about Chuck Lane in the past?

Here is the top hit for “Chuck Lane” on my old weblog, Grasping Reality. It is me quoting Ezra Klein on Chuck Lane:

Ezra Klein: Venomous responsibility: My colleague Chuck Lane accuses me of a “venomous smear” against Joe Lieberman…. What is surprising is that Lane, well, agrees with my venomous smear. “I understand that [Lieberman] seems to bear a grudge against the Democratic liberals who tried to unseat him in 2006 because of his vote for the war in Iraq,” writes Lane, “and that he might be engaged in a little pay back right now.” That’s pretty much the ballgame….

There are two component parts to my argument about Lieberman. The first is that the defeat of health-care reform will cost hundreds of thousands of lives. That’s not a particularly controversial statement…. The second is that Lieberman is being driven in part by pique, an assertion… Lane explicitly supports….

Lane squares this circle, or attempts to, by saying that “Joe Lieberman does not oppose insuring everyone.” True enough, but he’s willing to destroy the effort if it includes a Medicare buy-in, which he supported in 2000? A policy, in fact, that he supported as recently as three months ago? And why? Because, as Lane says, he wants “a little pay back?” That… is exactly my point….

Joe Lieberman is insured. Chuck Lane is insured. I am insured. If we get sick, we can go to the doctor. Studies show that our risk of death is substantially lower than those who are uninsured, as is our risk of medical bankruptcy, and chronic pain or impairment. Health-care reform, with or without the public option and the Medicare buy-in, will extend coverage to more than 30 million people. It will improve the coverage of tens of millions more. The debate over this policy is whether it cuts the deficit, but the point of this policy is that it saves lives. Making that clear using numbers derived from the best empirical evidence we’ve had is not venomous. It’s responsible….

“Every campaign, as President Clinton reminded us, is about the future,” Lieberman said in a 2006 debate against Ned Lamont. “And what I’m saying to the people of Connecticut, I can do more for you and your families to get something done to make health care affordable, to get universal health insurance.”

If this is doing more, I’d hate to see doing less.

Here are the rest of the top five:

The second is me snarking:

I cannot help but wonder what Chuck Lane would be writing if the Confederates had won the Civil War. It is interesting to contemplate.

and then quoting the highly estimable and eloquent Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Charles Lane compares the radicalism of white supremacists with the radicalism of escaped slaves….

Don’t forget: The victors write history. If the South had won the Civil War, what would our schoolchildren be taught about the abolitionists today? Some in the antislavery movement were as extreme, in their way, as the Southern “fire-eaters.”… The antislavery side had its moments of nullification as well. In 1851, a Boston crowd broke into a federal courthouse to free “Shadrach,” a black man being held there by U.S. marshals enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law. Abolitionist Theodore Parker declared this blatant defiance of Washington “the most noble deed done in Boston since the destruction of the tea in 1773.” I am not suggesting a moral equivalency…. But I am suggesting an attitudinal equivalency….

Lane is referencing, in rather disrespectful fashion, the awesome Shadrach Minkins. A Norfolk-area slave, Minkins’ unthinking extremism deluded him into believing that he was a human being. Upon this radical realization, the hot-headed Minkins fled North and took up with a band of ex-slaves and abolitionists who also had thoughtlessly decided that blacks were people. Lane is trying to cover himself by noting that he’s comparing attitude, not morals. This only works in the most absurdly narrow sense… like saying that both Roosevelt and Hitler had resigned themselves to mass killings….Shadrach Minkins and his folks were willing to ponder a jailbreak. Robert Rhett and his folks were willing to ponder the loss of two percent of America’s population…. [H]ad [Lane] used some empathy, the kind that leads you to use a man’s full name unencumbered by scare quotes, he’d see the difference. Instead we have a lazy, mealy-mouthed “on the other hand” kind of centrism, which is every bit as rote, calcified, and rehearsed as the extremes it claims to deride…

The third is me noting that Chuck Lane had not done his homework and snarking:

Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps? Charles Lane emulates Clive Crook and Michael Kinsley in not citing and not quoting from the people he is criticizing. But he goes further: he doesn’t even try to read what they have just written.

And then quoting Daniel Kuehn:

An email to Charles Lane of the Washington Post: Perhaps I’m missing something, but isn’t your “compromise” option precisely Krugman’s position? I think it’s the right idea, but I think that’s exactly where Keynesians are. The tough part is figuring out how to get the pro-austerity crowd to that point….

And Paul Krugman:

Jonathan Chait tells me that the new anti-Keynesian paladin is James Buchanan, who supposedly showed that stimulus, however worthy, can never be reversed. The elevation of Buchanan comes from Charles Lane at the Washington Post, who name-checks me as one of those naive Keynesians who doesn’t get it (and misuses the “in the long run we are all dead” line to boot). But wait: haven’t I dealt with this claim before? Why, yes–in a column published in the Times just two weeks ago….

But there is, I believe, a further obstacle to change: widespread, deep-seated cynicism about the ability of democratic governments, once engaged in stimulus, to change course in the future. So now seems like a good time to point out that this cynicism, which sounds realistic and worldly-wise, is actually sheer fantasy. Ending stimulus has never been a problem–in fact, the historical record shows that it almost always ends too soon….

This argument is then backed by various pieces of evidence. So I answered this latest anti-Keynesian claim before it was even made. Oh, and I was under the impression that if you’re going to characterize a named writer’s views, and in particular to make claims about what that writer doesn’t get, you might want to read a few things said writer has written–say, his last two columns. But I guess I don’t fully understand the rules here.

The fourth is me quoting DougJ of Balloon Juice:

This is repulsive: Charles Lane has written one of the most deeply repulsive things I have ever seen in a major newspaper:

Perhaps most disappointing of all is that the president himself, rather than living up to the words he spoke so eloquently in Tuscon, has chosen to fuel the fury on the Great Lakes. He labeled Walker’s legislation “an assault on unions,” while the White House political operation bused in more demonstrators to join those waving Walker = Hitler placards. These are the words and deeds of a partisan politician, not a national leader. If the brave Gabrielle Giffords could speak normally, what would she say about these events? I hope she would agree with me: This is a sad moment for liberalism, for the Democratic Party, and, really, for the whole country…

That’s right, Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head and almost killed, for reasons that may have been related to a right-wing movement that Lane often celebrates. And now he seeks to put words in her mouth; he seeks to make a speechless victim of political violence a spokesperson for his own political philosophy. This is disgusting and demands an apology.

And the fifth is me quoting a tweet from Duncan Black on the Chuck Lane column that called for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ire:

chuck lane really wants to win the worst WaPo columnist award, which is like double marathon or climbing everest…

I don’t have time right now to dig deeper than the top five. I have to go listen to a seminar…

But, briefly, what do I learn from this exercise?

It seems to me that Ezra Klein was properly civil and reacted completely appropriately to Chuck Lane: Lane simply shouldn’t be claiming that Klein is engaged in a “venomous smear” when Klein says things Lane also endorses. It seems to me that Daniel Kuehn and Paul Krugman were also properly civil and reacted appropriately to Chuck Lane: as Daniel points out, if Lane is going to claim that Paul Krugman really ought to be saying X, he should first check to make sure that Paul Krugman is not in fact already saying X; and as Paul points out, whenever you criticize Y for something that Y has already pre-butted, you really ought to drop a cite and a link to that pre-buttal. And it seems to me that my quoting Klein, Kuehn, and Lane is properly civil.

And as for DougJ, Duncan Black, Ta-Nehisi Coates? They are not civil. But I do think they reacted appropriately.

I think that–and I say this with snark = 0, and I say this disinterestedly–that the best thing Chuck Lane could do for his own reputation–and what he ought to do for his own sake as a moral agent–with his “Shadrach” and “brave Gabriel Giffords” pieces is to use the <strike>… </strike>… tag on every single word in both of them. And then append sincere apologies.

The purpose of this weblog as part of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the purpose of this Center, is to nurture a technocratic dialogue about growth and inequality so that we will be ready when the opportunity returns for a politics that can take advantage of the conclusions such a dialogue. All are welcome to join this dialogue.

But I would note–and once again here snark = 0–that Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, Jonathan Chait, and Ta-Nehisi Coates are highly intelligent, thoughtful, and careful contributors to this dialogue whose judgments and positions over the past two decades have proven to be accurate and insightful much more often than not. Those who make under-researched or inaccurate or ad hominem attacks on their positions are likely to find that their stock trades at a very heavy discount whenever we mark positions to market, as we do regularly.