Joe Klein

At times a couple of weeks ago, a visitor might have been forgiven for confusing Kandahar with New Hampshire during primary season. Everywhere I went — well, okay, on two consecutive stops — I ran into a bigfoot reporter working for a big U.S. publication. In Arghandab I met a guy in a polo shirt who turned out to be James Traub of the New York Times Magazine. A few kilometres down the road at Senjaray, I ran into Joe Klein, the Primary Colors author and columnist at Time.

I am enjoying putting up post after post on the firing of U.S. Gen. David McKiernan even though (because?) the lack of traffic on the comment boards below the posts suggests you folks are all, understandably, deep in Afghanistan fatigue. But now there’s this. On the first full day of the Obama presidency, Time‘s website ran this piece by the indefatigable Joe Klein, who pointed out an early, sharp rift between the White House and some military commanders over the proper size of a troop increase in Afghanistan. The Klein piece includes this killer quote:

Imagine any self-respecting scribe’s reaction as he looks around a crowded press room in a foreign country and sees Time magazine’s Joe Klein there. Yikes. No pressure! Here is the long blog post Klein produced after the Munich Security Conference; if he wrote a column for the paper edition, it will come out tomorrow in the States and countless days later in Canada. Mine’s coming tomorrow too.

Andrew Sullivan—linking to Joe Klein, who I linked to while linking to Dan Gardner, who was linking to Paul Wells—on the state of play in Washington.

Everyone’s talking about this Joe Klein rant on Time‘s political blog. You’ll probably want to read it, unless you’re a McCain fan, in which case at least it’ll give you something to get angry about. Small excerpt: