Monday, November 02, 2009

Riding to Mickey's Defense   [Jonah Goldberg]

Over at Bloggingheads, Bob Wright tries to make the case that Mickey Kaus is a fellow travelling right winger (it's around the 67 minute mark). He hangs much of his case on the fact that I said I "usually agree with" Mickey. Except, that's not what I said! I said, I'm a fan of Mickey's — and I am! (apologies for the Kausian exclamation points!).

Do I usually agree with Mickey, as Bob seems to think? The answer is: "Yeah, sort of." But not in a way that is all that helpful to Bob's somewhat slanderous assault on Mickey's integrity. What I like about Mickey's blog is that he is, with the possible exception of my late father, the best between-the-line reader I've ever known. He can in a sentence or two drill down 47 paragraphs into a New York Times story and find not only the buried lede, but the unspoken agenda or assumptions of the piece. His b.s. detector is set to find bovine particulates at 1 part per billion. I love that stuff.

More broadly, I think Bob is displaying a troubling view of how the Left should operate. Mickey is certainly inconvenient to the Left. But that doesn't make him a rightwinger. Pointing out where the Left is screwing up or is dishonest doesn't necessarily mean you're not of the Left yourself (just ask Ralph Nader or I. F. Stone!). I think of Mickey as an entertaining and sharp Ombudsman of the liberal establishment. If he spent his time defending the public option and wealth distribution and lord knows what else, I would disagree with him more. He's perfectly capable of writing that sort of stuff (See The End of Equality, for example). But that's not the sort of stuff he usually does over at Kaus Files. Moreover, when he does do that stuff, it has credibility precisely because you know it's not water-carrying. So I'm a fan of his even when I do disagree with him.

Oh, and on that point: I loved a couple of Bob's books, so by Bob's logic Bob must therefore be a rightwinger (it's "self-explanatory" as Bob puts it).

P.S. In the segment on Fox News, Mickey pretty much concedes that Steve Spruiell won their argument over Fox News.

11/02 12:47 PMShare