Mickey Kaus Is An Uninformed Idiot, Pt. 4,425

Mickey Kaus, last seen publishing the contents of a private email list for his own amusement, has now come up with a new idea (he gets one a year that have nothing to do with "let's destroy teacher's unions"); he wants to see a newspaper covering the Westside of Los Angeles. It actually starts off rather good:

Over a million people live here. Affluent people. People semi-obsessively concerned with local issues like crime, traffic, development, city and state politics and ill-served by the magisterial L.A. Times in far off downtown, which has to cover all of Southern California and seems to think paying attention to the West Side is somehow elitist, if not racist. ... You could hire five reporters--cheap, these days--and you'd have about four more reporters covering the area than the Times has. If they're the right reporters it shouldn't be that difficult to steal the Times' richest readers and the advertisers who want to reach them. (Many of those readers already get the New York Times for its national and international coverage. You would be the local supplement.)

There's no question that the LA Times is too big and too poorly mismanaged to pay proper attention to the many communities of Southern California. And it's also true that cuts to staff at local papers leave the country open to political trickery at the local level. So there's a lot to like about a niche-marketed local paper serving a fairly well-off community that would pay for the privilege. Instead of newspaper bailouts, fostering increased competition at the local level makes sense.

Which leads us to what Mickey Kaus, a guy who is somehow a paid writer, thinks is a good use of local resources for a new newspaper:

We want to know whom Mayor Villaraigosa is dating, and we want to see her picture. And if John Edwards visits his mistress at the Beverly Hilton and gets chased into a bathroom by National Enquirer reporters--hey, you know, maybe that's a story! (The LAT didn't think so.) By covering politics in a way that got at least a few hundred thousand readers to pay attention, you could take the first, big step toward changing the apathetic culture of Southern California (the culture that lets Democratic interest groups fill the void and call the shots).

That's right, Mickey's conception of a paper that would change the apathetic culture of Southern California is one that is essentially a tabloid with a selective bias toward people Mickey Kaus hates. Amazingly, he thinks that would be a big seller! I'd bet they could call it "The Things Mickey Kaus Obsesses Over Tribune" and print tens of copies! What a well-informed citizenry that would engender! Maybe a free pair of panties (perfect for sniffing) could come with every edition!

Since Kaus apparently Googles his name repeatedly and has emailed me in the past when I've called him out on his nonsense (and a guy who links to random Tumblr pages on his own site seems to have a real sensitivity to this kind of thing), I'll repeat to him what he said to Ezra Klein: "All communications are on the record."

Man I Wish I Saw This 24 Hours Ago

So I had a real good time at the book party for Rick Perlstein last night with Kevin Drum, Mark Kleiman, Todd Beeton, Vernon Lee, Armed Liberal from Winds of Change, my pal Digby and a couple others whose URLs escape me at the moment. Toward the end of the night, Mickey Kaus (no URL offered by me) showed up, as he occasionally does at the sporadic blogging get-togethers here in SoCal. He did not have his date Ann Coulter on his arm this time. I didn't hear this, but apparently he started talking people up about the Edwards love child story. Yes, he's as captivated by nonsense like that in public!

I really, really wish I had seen this bloggingheads takedown by Jonathan Alter beforehand (h/t LGM)





I've never seen a better distillation of the vacuousness of Kaus' "contrarian" shtick than that. I'm envious of Alter for not coming up with it myself, or for doing a "live bloggingheads session" and saying that to his face. Actually I usually just leave the room without acknowledging him.

On the bright side, I did see blogtopia's (y, sctp) most famous cats live and in person!

Oh, and buy Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, it rocks!

It's Irresponsible Not To Speculate

Look, I've only met Mickey Kaus once. He was not trying to sodomize a goat at the time. Is that evidence that he doesn't sodomize goats on a regular basis? I think we have to ask the question.

Also, I hear his carpeting is pregnant with a Presidential love-child. Sure, it's just something written on the Internet. But it HAS to be part of any conversation we have about Kaus at any time ever.

I mean, there are goats in America, there's carpeting in America. Mickey Kaus LIVES in America. Do I have to connect all the dots here?

M-I-C, K-E-Y, G-O-A-T-S

Look, I'm coming late to this one, and I don't know if Mickey Kaus blows goats or not. But a lot of people ARE talking about it, and it would be irresponsible not to pursue this further. What's more, Kaus hasn't addressed the issue, which clearly means he's hiding something. And if he does address it, he's afraid that people will find out the truth. So I don't know what the truth really is. But does anyone?

All I'm saying is, if enough people are calling him a goat-blower, it's probably reputable.

Dept. of Mickey Kaus is a Shmuck

Somehow I drifted over to Kausfiles, where he's flagging a National Enquirer story about John Edwards (somehow I don't think he pays attention to the half-dozen "Laura Bush moves out of the White House/Condi sleeping with George" stories they've run with recently). But this is even more ridiculous.

Mickey's Assignment Desk--Baracktrackers: 2,000 words on Dem policy bigshots who went with Obama when he looked like the coming thing--and are now desperately trying to somehow get back in Hillary's good graces. Foreign policy types are usually the most obvious about this sort of thing. ... Bonus: Point out that this is the type of political judgment the experts are supposed to get right. Making the mistake of betting on Obama--assuming he doesn't, you know, win--isn't all that different from making the mistake of betting on Chalabi.

Let me get this straight; making a choice for President is the same as BELIEVING THE LIES OF A KNOWN FABRICATOR that results in the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history. Also making a choice for President is somehow an exercise in "political judgment" and not conviction or shared interests on policy.

Also, should Obama win and the so-called "Baracktrackers" (evidence) be proven right, which is entirely possible considering, you know, not one American has cast a ballot yet, will somebody write a 2,000 word piece on how Mickey Kaus looked foolish again by jumping the gun? (Define foolish-ed. Not enough room on the Internet.)

...the subtext of this, of course, is Kaus trying to squirm out of his support for the Iraq war, so he relates that specific error in foreign policy judgment to potentially backing the wrong horse in a Presidential contest where there are about 1,000 additional factors at play. That's the height of condescension and self-regard.

UPDATE: FWIW, Kaus emails me to say:

I didn't support the Iraq War. I waffled and then Bob Wright convinced me it was better to hold off, though I came down against it on legal grounds, not because I thought it would be as big a mess as it's become.

I can't precisely find anything to corroborate this, although this makes it sound like he thought it would be "politically better for Bush to attack next winter," which is of course a ringing antiwar stance. But I'll take his word for it. Also, this is a devastating rebuttal to comparing FP experts who decided to back Obama to hawks who decided to believe the lies of Chalabi.

What's wrong with "Darkie"? They're dark, aren't they?

I need to stop reading Mickey Kaus.

Half-defense: I don't quite understand why it's offensive to call Sen. Obama a "halfrican." It's a useful word! It efficiently describes a real phenomenon. It isn't, on its face, pejorative--and even if it were, it wouldn't be pejorative for long if it were simply used descriptively to mean people with one parent from Africa.

The funniest part of this is the update...

Update: A reader emails to point out the word is distressingly close to "half-breed." That does seem like a hard connotation to shake.

Technical correctness is not a good enough reason to use what amounts to a slur. Hebe is short for Hebrew but that doesn't mean I'd answer to it. I don't know how someone can be so culturally tone-deaf until I remembered what Mickey Kaus' house looks like:



(h/t TBogg for the pic)