I’m clearly too feral to have the proper responses, but I’ve long considered Cokie Roberts to be too lightweight to be worth paying attention to. But since lightweight goes over well in many parts of America, Cokie still has a large following. And it’s separately worth paying attention to a fight she picked over Obama’s stalled trade deal, the TransPacific Partnership. The fact that people with popular followings are still defending it says the Administration remains keen to revive it, so opponents need to guard against becoming too complacent.

The specifics: Cokie and her husband, Steve, went after Florida representative Alan Grayson in January in a syndicated column over his stance against the TransPacific Partnership. The piece was a collection of tired bromides and cherry-picked factoids about supposed virtues “free trade,” when many commentators, including your humble blogger, have explained that this proposed pact (and its evil twin, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) can’t properly be considered trade deals, since trade is already substantially liberalized. Instead, their real purpose is to further enrich US multinationals by strengthening already-too-generous intellectual property protections and ceding even more power to secret tribunals that allow foreign investors to sue governments for potential profits they claim to have lost due to regulations. Experts have already said, for instance, that the generally weak Dodd Frank regulations could be torn down through this process.

Congress has developed an unexpected bit of spine, primarily due to the unheard of secrecy that the Obama Administration has maintained around the draft terms of these pending trade agreements. Over 140 Democratic representatives and some 20 Republic have signed letters against giving Obama the blank check of “fast track” authority, which would enable him to present Congress with a done deal and allow them only to approve it or vote it down. The opposition is even more serious than that, since there are both Democrats and Republicans who by various whip counts are pegged as voting with the open opponents, but for various reasons won’t go public with their stance prior to a vote. Even John Boehner has said he can’t muster the votes to get fast track passed. And that’s before the fact that Senate majority leader Harry Reid has said he won’t table fast track legislation either.

But does Cokie give readers any of this important detail, particularly that opposition is a deep-seated, bipartisan affair? Nope. She tried to make it solely the province of loonie lefties, and to personalize it in the form of Alan Grayson:

A typical criticism came from Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, who told the Huffington Post, “We’ve tried free trade, and not only has free trade not improved the U.S. economy, it’s gutted manufacturing and driven down our labor standards.” Liberal ideologues like Grayson are flat-out wrong….

Memo to Cokie: you are supposed to be enough of an insider to know which targets to pick. Grayson happens to be smart, well versed in the policy issues (yes, a shocker for Congresscritters), pugnacious, and not cowed by personal attacks.

Grayson tore into Cokie on his Tumblr, which is far from a mass medium outlet. Yet the Beltway insiders appear to have designated him the victor in this dustup. The fact that The Hill reported on his retort and reprinted some of his most cutting remarks is an understated compliment. From the top of the article Alan Grayson: Cokie Roberts an ‘infohack’ in The Hill:

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) dubbed political analyst Cokie Roberts an “infohack” on Saturday, after Roberts sharply criticized Grayson’s stance on free trade agreements. In a blog post Saturday, Grayson uses Roberts’ criticism of him to try to round up campaign cash, calling her “a consummate Washington insider.” “Are you disgusted by this crooked and underhanded attack by Cokie Roberts?” Grayson wrote. “Do you oppose ‘free trade’ giveaways?”

Digsby also had a serious schadenfreude attack:

It’s been a while since I featured Congressman Grayson here, but this was too good to pass by without a mention. It would appear that the pre-eminent Village dowager, Cokie Roberts, has taken exception to his opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership trade pact. In fact, she was incensed that the hippies would even deem to involve themselves in such important grown-up issues. Grayson responds and, as always, pulls no punches. He patiently explains why the TPP is yet another assault on the middle class and why Democrats must oppose it.

Now with that warm-up, I’ll quote his post at some length, but you really should do yourself a favor and read it in full. The article consist of two parts, each of which is important. In the first, Grayson shreds her lightweight argument. In the second, which is the part that likely got the Beltway types all a-twitter, is that he discusses at length how her brother is a heavyweight lobbyist whose clients would be very well served if the TPP passed.

For your delectation:

You can read the rest of this shellacking here. Grayson also asks for a modest contribution and I hope you’d consider giving him one.