KAUS ON FIRE

If you like catty web-commentary – and I have no idea whether you do – then check out Mickey Kaus’s first two items today. He skewers Salon; then he skewers Bob Kuttner, the oleaginous socialist who runs the mind-numbingly earnest American Prospect. (Kuttner’s intellectual acumen can be gleaned from a cover-piece he wrote for The New Republic at the beginning of the 1990s predicting an economic “abyss” for the entire decade. Oh, well.) My favorite quote from Kuttner’s snooty letter is when he refers to the always-readable kausfiles.com as a “vanity webletter.” I love it when these tired old poobahs refer to weblogs as “vanity” publications. Eric Alterman described andrewsullivan.com as such in a previous column. Kuttner and Alterman are just jealous because weblogs are new and interesting and free and subversive, while they are pouring out the same old schlock for media conglomerates and lefty philanthropists, with nothing better to do with their money. And people actually read us.