1. Joe Klein uses Republican committee staffers as his sources;

2. Joe Klein accepts the word of said Republican staffers without question;

3. Joe Klein doesn’t bother to contact Democrats before writing about their proposals;

4. Joe Klein doesn’t bother to actually read the bill he’s writing about;

5. When challenged on abject factual inaccuracies in his column, Joe Klein only compounds the misery and makes things worse;

6. Time Magazine includes only said inaccuracies in their print edition, no correction.

7. This is the only thing Time Magazine’s 4 million subscribers are going to read:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.

8. …none of which, except for the “Limbaugh is drooling” part, is true.

Considering that one of the Democratic Presidential hopefuls is eventually going to emerge from the pack and have to start fending off the Republicans instead of each other, it seems like now might be a good time for them all to start fighting back about how easily Republican propaganda makes its way into the headlines — much to their detriment. They are the ones who are ultimately going to have to push back against the “Democrats Soft On Terror” meme, and really, there are more practical ways than voting for a bellicose amendment put forward by Joe Lieberman with the transparent agenda of launching a war against Iran.

We don’t have a “left wing attack machine,” we’ve got a few bloggers, a couple of radio personalities, a handful of authors and journalists and some candidates who have the spotlight at the moment.

I mean, come on. “It would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans?” Some Republican spinmeister fed that to him whole. Klein just managed to swallow it.  Why is Time Magazine letting the guy who said this write about FISA anyway:

People like me who favor this [NSA wiretapping] program don’t yet know enough about it yet. Those opposed to it know even less — and certainly less than I do.

The moment is ripe for someone to call “bullshit.”