According to media critic Eric Alterman, Time senior writer and columnist Joe Klein declared at an April 11 event that Democrats will not be successful in upcoming elections “if their message is that they hate America -- which is what has been the message of the liberal wing of the party for the past twenty years.” As Media Matters for America documented, on the June 12, 2005, edition of NBC's The Chris Matthews Show, Klein described Democrats as “a party with absolutely no redeeming social value.”

After attending a discussion with Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) fellow Julia E. Sweig, part of CFR's "HBO History Maker Series," Alterman described Klein's outburst in an April 11 post on Altercation, his MSNBC.com weblog:

I went to a breakfast this morning sponsored by HBO and the Council on Foreign Relations where Tina Brown interviewed Julia Sweig, author of Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century, here, before a small gathering of media and foreign policy bigwigs. ... It was a useful discussion with many useful tributaries and give and take with the audience and we all felt better for it.

That is right up until the very last moment when, after someone brought up the question of the whether the Democrats will be able to present an effective alternative to Bush in the next election, Joe Klein shouted out, “Well they won't if their message is that they hate America -- which is what has been the message of the liberal wing of the party for the past twenty years.”

Alterman went on to lament that Klein is, in Alterman's words, the “most liberal columnist” at Time, America's highest circulation newsweekly. Alterman wrote:

That's right. The most liberal columnist at the America's largest weekly newsmagazine pretends that the message of liberals for the past twenty years has been that they “hate America,” just as if he were reading from talking points issued by Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. (Don't get me started.)