Friday Rant: Liberal Media Whore Michael Kinsley Defends Goldman Sachs

The other day I took Atlantic Wire scribe Jen Doll to task for writing an op-ed piece defending the Morgan Stanley banker who stabbed a cab driver over a disputed fare. I called out the ridiculously named Ms. Doll for using her media platform to defend a rich scumbag who certainly didn't need any help from her supposedly liberal publication. But I now feel I must offer Ms. Doll an apology, for she really is far too low in the media food chain for me to be picking on the way I did. Nobody really cares about the opinions of a glorified blogger who apparently spends a lot of her time when not kissing Wall Street ass writing about mindless pop culture.

Instead, I'd rather readjust my aim and go for some really big game. That means it's your turn, Michael Kinsley, formerly the house liberal on CNN's long departed but unlamented political debate show, Crossfire. Kinsley left CNN to become a founding editor for Slate, yet another in a long line corporate propaganda outlets masquerading as part of the supposedly "liberal media." Working for billionaire Bill Gates (and being married to another Gates flunky) must really agree with Kinsley, because he recently took a new job as a mouthpiece for billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as an editor of his eponymous business publication.

First, let's set the stage. Everyone knows by now that former Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith made quite a splash last week when he wrote a damning op-ed piece for the New York Times called "Why I'm Leaving Goldman Sachs." Almost immediately after the article appeared, Michael Bloomberg was, not surprisingly, condemning it and heaping praise upon the "vampire squid." Meanwhile, Bloomberg the magazine published an unsigned editorial blasting Smith:

It must have been a terrible shock when Smith concluded that Goldman actually was primarily about making money. He spares us the sordid details, but apparently it took more than a decade for the scales to finally fall from his eyes. ...

...[W]hat an employee! He worked at Goldman as an intern in college and worked there continuously until today. “I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world.” Then there was being “a Rhodes Scholar national finalist” and “winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics.”

We have some advice for Smith, as well as the thousands of college students who apply to work at Goldman Sachs each year: If you want to dedicate your life to serving humanity, do not go to work for Goldman Sachs. That’s not its function, and it never will be. Go to work for Goldman Sachs if you wish to work hard and get paid more than you deserve even so. (Or if you want to make your living selling derivatives but don’t know what a derivative is, as Smith concedes in passing that he didn’t at first.)

Wow, pretty harsh, eh? Probably written by someone who worked in the business and is taking umbrage at his old buddies being attacked, right?

Wrong. The author of the hit job on Greg Smith was none other than Mr. Resident Liberal on Crossifire himself, Michael Kinsley. Here is Politico with the details:

Michael Kinsley, the former editor of the New Republic and former columnist at the Washington Post, is the author of the recent Bloomberg View editorial that chastised former disgruntled Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith, he confirmed by phone today.

"I just proposed, and the editor-in-chief David Shipley liked it, so I did it," Kinsley, now an editor at Bloomberg View, told me.

The editorial is attributed to "The Editors," which led to some speculation that Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- owner of the Bloomberg media empire -- had been behind the editorial, given his own public defense of Goldman Sachs last week. But Kinsley said Bloomberg (the man) had nothing to do with it.

"Any thought that this was Bloomberg protecting his friend [Goldman CEO] Lloyd Blankfein is ludicrous," he said.

Yeah, that's Michael Kinsley, a real man of the people all right. This is what happens when you've been whoring yourself out to billionaires for so long that you don't even recognize it as whoring anymore. Kinsley didn't even need his new boss to tell him to write a blistering editorial defending the biggest enemy of working and middle class people in America, he just instinctively KNEW that it would please Mayor .0000001 Percenter. Note the sly way he chides Smith by saying, "If you want to dedicate your life to serving humanity, do not go to work for Goldman Sachs," as if Smith was a naif who had no idea what he was getting into when he went to work for the firm. In this way, Kinsley can plausibly claim that he wasn't actually defending Goldman Sachs, but merely blasting Smith for having an unrealistically idealist world view.

But here is the quote from Kinsley that is particularly galling:

"I didn't know it would be such a big deal when I wrote the piece," he added. "I just read Smith's piece and thought it was funny."

Yep--it was pretty damn funny, Micahel, you fake liberal fuck. Just like it was pretty damn funny when those derivatives Goldman Sachs was pedaling to its clients KNOWING that they were dodgy helped crash the whole fucking economy back in 2008 and cost millions of working and middle class Americans their jobs. The same working and middle class Americans that liberals like you profess to actually give a shit about. And it was even funnier when those same working and middle class Americans were asked to fork over $700 billion of their tax money to save the very same financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, from their own bad acts. And goddam if isn't just hysterical that NO ONE from Goldman Sachs has been prosecuted for all of this rampant fraud and that they continued to receive millions of dollars in bonuses even after the taxpayer bailouts. I'm sure the 46 million people on food stamps, the numerous college graduates with six-figure student loan debts who can't find a decent job, the retirees whose pensions are being gutted, the underwater homeowners and the increasingly desperate wage earners whose 401K accounts have been bouncing up and down like a yo-yo are laughing their asses off right along with you.

It would be one thing if this drivel had been written by a conservative cretin like your fellow Crossfire alum, the late Robert Novak. You expect a life long toady to power like him to carry the water of billionaire assholes. But when it comes from someone with a reputation as a respected liberal commentator, it is far more insidious. With the likes of you inside the tent, the liberal and progressive movement can truly make use of the Walt Kelly saying from the old comic strip, Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."


Bonus: At least when The Who sold out, they still fucking ROCKED