DON'T BELIEVE WHAT ED KLEIN WRITES, SAYS ... ER, ED KLEIN

This weekend, the New York Post published a new Ed Klein article that was taken very, very seriously by idiots:

President Obama has quietly promised Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren complete support if she runs for president -- a stinging rebuke to his nemesis Hillary Clinton, sources tell me.

And why would Obama do this? Apart from the fact that Hillary Clinton is "his nemesis" -- or was, six years ago -- it's all about Obama's radical lefty Marxist commie pinko ideology, which, Klein tells us, Hillary doesn't share:

... Obama is worried that if Hillary succeeds him in the White House, she will undo many of his policies....

"Barack, Michelle, and Valerie [Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett] have been talking about Elizabeth Warren for quite some time," says an Obama administration source....

"The Obamas believe that Warren sees things from the same ideological point of view as they do. She is a committed progressive who, like Obama, wants to transform America into a European-style democratic-socialist state."

And Hillary Clinton absolutely doesn't, according to Klein.

Which is odd, because the same Ed Klein told us back in 2005, when he was promoting a book called The Truth About Hillary, that Hillary is (as the book puts it) "notoriously left-wing." Klein told FrontPage Magazine back then that Hillary has "a very far-left political agenda," and told Human Events that "Hillary is a true, bred to the bone, ideologue"; asked by Human Events to rank the threat she posed to conservatives on a scale of 1 to 10, Klein ranked her a 10, with Bill Clinton as just a 7. ("Bill is a much more pragmatic person than she is. He's ready to compromise much more quickly than she is.") Klein airily dismissed any centrist moves by Hillary as pure fraud:

HE: You believe that Hillary, since she has entered the US Senate, has been trying to re-position herself as a moderate and show that she's not so far to the left. Is that who she has become? Has she had a change of heart?

Klein: "I don't believe so. I believe she made an accurate calculation that a liberal cannot get elected President of the United States – an out and out liberal. That's not where the American public is today. We are becoming a more conservative country all the time. And Hillary, with her ambition to win the White House, acknowledges that by, in effect, turning her back on some of her former positions, some of her former supporters and re-positioning herself as a moderate on such issues as God, prayer, abortion without parental consent, immigration; she's adopted many of the Republican positions or at least has moved toward those positions in recent years, doing what Bill Clinton did – triangulating by adopting his opponent's positions on things. I don't believe this is a sincere change of heart. I think this is a pure political calculation on her part."

So what Ed Klein 2005 was telling us was that she was a Manchurian Candidate just biding her time until she could become president and unabashedly be the bred-to-the-bone, notoriously left-wing ideologue that she's been since college. Is Ed Klein 2014 saying that Ed Klein 2005 was lying to us? After all, if Hillary is so secretly radical, why doesn't that radical Marxist Barack Obama consider her the one who will continue his life's work of "transform[ing] America into a European-style democratic-socialist state"?

Maybe Ed Klein 2014 needs to interview Ed Klein 2005 about that -- though I wonder if Ed Klein 2005 would talk to him on the record.

(Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.)