Public Enemy Number 1

The Right is now attacking a guy whose prior claim to fame was showing up on a bunch of "I Love the 80s" shows.

I'm not a fan of Joel Stein. Far from it. For years, his favored tactic has been to try and figure out what the most wrong thing to say is, then argue it, and insert references to Paris Hilton or popular MTV shows in place of any kind of trenchant analysis. He's the worst public face for my pop culture-obsessed generation. He's an entertainment hanger-on and serial attention-seeker who has written more bad comedy than an imagined country full of Mark Russells.

In fact, when everybody was yelling about Robert Scheer getting fired from the LA Times opinion page and being replaced with Jonah Goldberg, I was more upset that Stein was moving to a weekday column. His Sunday column was the most universally disliked weekly piece of writing I've ever seen in a major paper. Every week there would be four or five letters saying "Who the hell is this Joel Stein idiot? Why is he in the opinion section?" And I agreed with them. He's unreadable.

And I knew that he'd get a swelled head from this move to weekdays, and that he'd move from writing about Lindsay Lohan or Tom Cruise and into the political arena, where he has no credibility and no clue, and I knew he'd say something totally stupid, and then people like Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin would take this dink's words and suggest that he speaks for all liberals everywhere.

And exactly what I feared would happen, has happened.

Really, conservatives, you can have Joel Stein. Use him as the test case for your re-education camps. With any luck, he'll be Dean Esmay in no time.