One who is not ready to forgive Joe Klein for having cheered hard for Bush when it was cool to do so is Glen Greenwald, top progressive blogger at Salon.com, at least until the Time pundit shows remorse and apologizes for his Bush-enabling misdeeds.

Today, Greenwald presents an example that illustrates what he calls Klein's "extreme revisionism":

Joe Klein, this week's Time Magazine, on George Bush's legacy:

  Bush has that forlorn what-the-hell-happened? expression on his face, the one that has marked his presidency at difficult times. You never want to see the President of the United States looking like that.

  So I've been searching for valedictory encomiums. . . . I'd add the bracing moment of Bush with the bullhorn in the ruins of the World Trade Center, but that was neutered in my memory by his ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the "Mission Accomplished" sign. The flight-suit image is one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure.

Joe Klein, Face the Nation, May 4, 2003, with Bob Schieffer -- 3 days after Bush's Mission Accomplished speech:

  BOB SCHIEFFER: How does [the Democratic presidential primary debate] play off against the pictures we saw this week of President Bush landing on the aircraft -- aircraft carrier and appearing before these screaming, adoring groups of military people?  As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time. And if you're a political consultant, you can just see campaign commercial written all over the pictures of George Bush.

  JOE KLEIN: Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. That was the first thing that came to mind for me. And it just shows you how high a mountain these Democrats are going to have to climb. You compare that image, which everybody across the world saw, with this debate last night where you have nine people on a stage and it doesn't air until 11:30 at night, up against Saturday Night Live, and you see what a major, major struggle the Democrats are going to have to try and beat a popular incumbent president.

Klein has been a TPM hero ever since he switched tanks. Take this post written last July by TPM Cafe's M. J. Rosenberg, for instance, wherein the author praises Klein for condemning the neocons who campaigned hard for the Iraq war, and attacks those in the media who acted as accomplices, without once mentioning that Klein himself made it clear one month before the invasion that he believed the war was justified, as reported by Arianna Huffington:

KLEIN ON MEET THE PRESS (FEBRUARY, 2003): "This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it--it's--it-it probably is." When Tim Russert presses Klein on why he thinks Iraq is "the right war," Klein responds, "Because sooner or later, this guy has to be taken out. Saddam has -- Saddam Hussein has to be taken out... The message has to be sent because if it isn't sent now, if we don't do this now, it empowers every would-be Saddam out there and every would-be terrorist out there."

I agree with Greenwald and call on Klein and any other remorseless war apologists to admit guilt and ask for forgiveness to the American people and the families of the dead and injured in Iraq.