I've been meaning to post this for a while. In an article exposing yet another instance of Matt Bai's perfidy in print (you can click, but you'll wish you hadn't), Matt Taibbi describes a conversation with David Gergen in a published post-election roundtable at Rolling Stone headquarters.
In the course of the discussion, Taibbi discovers that Gergen has him confused with Matt Bai, the New York Times writer. Which leads to this description of "how to be Matt Bai" — enjoy:
Bai is one of those guys -- there are hundreds of them in this business -- who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning "centrist" pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing "unrealistic" liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it's like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry. First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you're in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you've got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won't be long.
Bai is the poster child of those guys.
And that's how you grow the modern pseudo-left media establishment. Wickedness at that level is very much like that of the political types in the Harry Potter series. They are eager to compromise with evil because ... well, it's wonderfully career-enhancing, and goodness is so not-done these days. 
Or, to pick a stronger example — though the Harry Potter books are very strong on this subject — these people are like the Richard Rich character in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Rich is the Judas to Thomas More's Jesus, but that wasn't ever his goal. Rich just wanted a job, and didn't care where he got it. We've had our eye on Matt Bai for a while; a made man to be sure. (The link shows you Matt Bai sucking up to Pete Peterson; one of his specialities.) Nice to see the road to his ilkdom so neatly described.
He's not alone, of course; according to Taibbi "there are hundreds of them in this business". Nominations?
GP
