getting real about Kaus

Daniel Larison can't understand why Matt Yglesias complained about Mickey Kaus; Ross Douthat thinks Matt protests too much.

I find this whole conservative pretense of not understanding either Slate's rabid anti-liberalism or Mickey Kaus's shtick deeply aggravating. Look, Slate's business is attacking liberals. It always has been. What percentage, do you think, of Slate's stories is dedicated to "shaking up liberal orthodoxy"? How many stories do they print that tweak liberals, compared to attacking conservative policies? No, Slate isn't conservative-- it's not interested in pursuing any positive ideology. It's interested in being "contrarian", "iconoclastic" and "edgy". And what does that mean? It means attacking liberals, of course.

Slate's sins require more than a brief post-- I've never encountered a more glaring advertisement for the idea that you can't at once fetishize upsetting the conventional wisdom and still prioritize quality writing or the truth. If you want the defining Slate piece, read this rant from Jacob Weisberg about the Connecticut Senatorial primary where Ned Lamont defeated Joe Lieberman. Weisberg's contempt for liberals and opposition to the war in Iraq burns off the screen. It never seems to occur to Weisberg that Ned Lamont was an advocate for the issues that Connecticut Democrats believed in, that in the most simple way, Lamont better reflected the kind of Senator Connecticut wanted to elect. That notion appears unthinkable to Weisberg; he can't begin to imagine that Connecticut voters actually supported a liberal, anti-war candidate.

Like I said, Slate is a large topic. Defending Kaus as a genuine liberal, though-- that takes balls. Look, if you simply want to have a basic idea about Kaus's priorities, just read his archives for an hour. How often does he attack conservatives or Republicans compared to Democrats and liberals? Off-hand, I'd say he attacks liberals, without exaggeration, ten times for every time he attacks conservatives. To say that his blog is not dominated by attacking liberals and Democrats is simply wrong. Kaus's whole shtick, which he works relentlessly, is to find the "liberal conventional wisdom", attack it, and then throw up his hands and say "But I'm a liberal too!" (Doesn't he also have some annoying writing tics that he flogs constantly? --ed. He does!) There's nothing particularly compelling or interesting about Kaus's analysis, nothing that he really has going for him besides longevity. But that "I'm just a vexed liberal" line allows him to maintain some semblance of relevance. It's just plain careerism.

Not to be mean, but here's the sort of thing that kind of thinking produces.

Do you want to know what the most unintentionally funny blog post of all time was? Here it is. (Thanks to Kaus's weird system you have to put the words "Report from the Field" into your Find in This Page search bar.) There are thousands of blogs, of course, and millions of posts. But I feel pretty confident making that statement, because it's that bad.

During the wave of colony collapse disorder from a year or two ago-- when all the bees were dying-- Kaus wrote a blog post (for which he was paid, real US currency) saying "My mom sees lots of bees in her garden."

Take a moment and let that marinate. Let it wash over you, gentle reader.

My mom sees lots of bees in her garden! He actually wrote that in a professional publication! It boggles the mind. Bad enough that it's the worst excuse for evidence that I've frankly ever encountered. Never mind that Kaus seems to think that his mother reporting that there is a lot of bees in her garden actually has some sort of value to how we might think of the issue of colony collapse disorder, a real, empirical phenomenon observed by the scientific community and whose existence was never seriously debated by anyone.

No, what is really aggravating and problematic is how transparent Kaus's anti-liberal thinking is. It's so easy to imagine the gears chugging in his brain. "Bees disappearing, eh! Why, that's environmentalism. And environmentalism is a liberal issue. I must attack this idea at once! But how? I know! Mother said she sees lots of bees in her garden! Take that, Joe Kuttner! Captain Contrarian strikes again!"

That's why it rankles for people to be perplexed about calling Slate in general and Kaus in particular creatures of the right. It's true, they aren't overly concerned with advocating conservative policy positions. They're just interested in tearing down liberalism because of their cultural distaste for what they perceive liberal people to be.