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By Elton Beard There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't. I don't. |
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| ARCHIVE | ARCHIVE | ARCHIVE |
| Sunday, December 7, 2003 |
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Shorter George F. Will:
The Dean of Shallow Thought
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Shorter Jeff Jacoby:
Lieberman's tangled views on religion
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| Friday, December 5, 2003 |
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Shorter Charles Krauthammer:
The Delusional Dean
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See Also: the indispensable Daily Howler diagnoses the duplicitous doctor.
Update: Nick Confessore auto-contextualizes Krauthammer at TAPPED (with thanks to commenter Steady Eddie).
| Wednesday, December 3, 2003 |
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kausfiles
A snypy political Weblog.
Mickey's Convenient Critique
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Mickey's convenient semi-principled critique: Mickey Kaus has fleshed out his criticism of Senator Clinton's statements regarding the administration's Iraq policy. He concludes that her admittedly "serious critique" of the White House's latest plan for a handover of power in Iraq is nonetheless probably a cynical act of "positioning", rather than a "sincere and principled" criticism.
His critique, while perhaps less serious, may still be right - although there are obvious counterarguments ("positioning" - i.e. considering the impact of one's statements on listeners - is not a lifestyle choice for politicians, it's a job requirement. Nothing wrong with that! More importantly, circumspection is hardly incompatible with being "sincere and principled". Plus, Kaus's critique relies on Sen. Clinton's "left-wing acolytes" being too stupid to recognize her hard line on Iraqi occupation for what it is. ["Left-wing"? Conflating center-right liberals with leftists, eh? Ed. Yes he is. It works for him!]).
But does Mickey really mean his critique?
There are two possibilities:
1) He's being earnest and high-minded. He really believes politicians should behave with sincerity and adherence to principle, and he finds Senator Clinton wanting in those qualities. He's worried, along with many liberals, about the degradation of political discourse in this country. Since he's earnest and high-minded, we can now expect him to criticize equally sharply any Republican operative or politician who is less than forthright with the American public, or who smears political opponents as unpatriotic. After all, if his goal is to improve the political culture, he will deploy his efforts against the worst offenders regardless of party affiliation.The jury is out, but I tend to favor #2. ... Kaus is obviously a very smart guy, basically liberal, with complicated views, who once recognized when the other side was wrong. And at some point he switched and became someone who only sees what's wrong with his own side, in fairly crude terms. Not that it's been an unprofitable transformation! He ended up in a great ecological niche shared with only a select few - Fox liberals Susan Estrich and Tammy Bruce come to mind (to his credit, Kaus has not yet been spotted on Fox). But his practice may not be helpful to his purported cause. [You sure he has one? Ed. I think so. But I'm not sure what it is...] 4:08 P.M.2) He's being puerile. His style of attack gives him a way to bash Sen. Clinton as insincere and unprincipled without ever actually making a case for that. He merely posits an either/or choice - "sincere and principled" vs. "positioning" - and then selects the latter by the wave of a hand. Imagine that Sen. Clinton had saluted Mr. Bush for his deft handling of Iraq's occupation. Do you think Kaus would have swallowed that line, and praised her for it? Or do you suspect he would have found something snarky to say about her anyway? Of course you do. Now, see how easy it is to assert malfeasance without recourse to actual evidence?
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Busy, busy, busy. What bokononists whisper whenever they think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is. |
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