Pete called Michael Harriot about the scathing article & they actually had a productive conversation

[highplainsdem]

13. I wish Michael Harriot was even half as mature as Pete Buttigieg is,

and half as willing to really listen to others.

I'm not surprised to read that Harriot hates phone calls, or to see him admit, "Talking bothers me."

Talking gives others a chance to react and respond.

As opposed to the insular safety of writing whatever the hell you want to say for a column, going on without interruption, without having to consider anyone else's opinion, or whatever facts anyone else might bring up.

I suspect Harriot sometimes gets pushback or even outright vetos from his editors. I'm guessing that's what happened when he wanted to mock Joe Biden and accuse him of lying when the Corn Pop story resurfaced -- that he'd originally written that as a column but had it rejected by his editors, probably because it wasn't true. (The magazine Harriot writes for had published an earlier pece alluding to that story years ago, and the editors would have known it was true.) So Harriot chopped the rejected column into tweets and "published" it on Twitter, where his followers could be counted on to drown out anyone trying to point out he had his facts wrong.

I think it would do Harriot, and the magazine he writes for, a lot of good if a lot of his columns were rejected. And if he tried talking more to people about what he says, and really listening to what they say in return.

Imagine, for instance, how much more worthwhile a column he could have written if, before he wrote the piece calling Mayor Pete a lying MFer, he'd actually contacted Buttigieg himself and told him about his reaction to what was said years ago, and had an actual dialog about it, where he actually listened and seriously considered what Buttigieg said.

Imagine that.