The Dismal Séance

Joe Klein channels Abraham Lincoln.

An actual sentence that an actual person actually wrote:

What would Lincoln do about the fiscal cliff?

That's Joe Klein striving mightily to claim the award for Worst Essay Ever Inspired By A Steven Spielberg Movie, a title held til now by an elaborate Thomas Friedman metaphor involving Palestinians, iPads, and a "bigger boat." (*)

Klein's next sentence, incidentally, is "The answer seems obvious," and the rest of the paragraph includes such gems as "On the spending side, he would probably have to look at health care in a new way." I'll spare you the details, but apparently if Lincoln were alive today he would be a politically canny sockpuppet for Joe Klein.

The actual point of Klein's column is that "if we're going to resume dealmaking in Washington, my colleagues in the media are going to have to get off the high horses we mounted when, in the wake of Watergate, exposing 'corruption' became the surest path to journalistic gold and glory." You'll have to judge for yourself what's most risible about that sentence: the idea that D.C. has deserted dealmaking, the idea that the press has too many watchdogs, or the fact that Klein's description of those watchdogs includes the word "we."

(* Note: Thomas Friedman did not actually write such a metaphor. Or at least I don't think he did. I black out a lot when I read his columns.)