My old friend and colleague Mickey Kaus has been having great fun at the expense of the New York Times’ desperate, and increasingly incoherent editorial shifts on Iraq. He’s right to. But doesn’t he also have an obligation to tell us what he actually thinks? Mickey has given almost no actual analysis of the most important question we are currently facing, despite running a 24-hour, Microsoft-funded blog. What’s up with that? Mr Raines may have declining credibility on this matter, but at least he’s saying something. Shouldn’t Mickey refrain from criticizing others for saying nothing until he has the good graces to take a stand? And I don’t mean how an Iraq war could impact welfare reform or the latest designs from Toyota.
BRENT BOZELL’S GAY PROBLEM: I’m not exactly one to come to Eric Alterman’s defense, but with the figure of Brent Bozell, you really do have an example of someone who appears woefully ignorant about the political diversity among homosexuals. For Bozell, along with, I might add, left-wing ideologues like Richard Goldstein, any openly gay person is ipso facto a liberal. Bozell simply assumes in this column that Rick Berke and Frank Bruni of the New York Times are left-liberals solely because they’re gay. Now Rick is a flaming liberal, as well as a master of New York Times internal politics. But Frank Bruni clearly isn’t in any ideological sense. Anyone who read his last book on George Bush would have a hard time saying that Bruni is ideologically blinded to Bush’s strengths (and weaknesses) as a president. But Bozell simply asserts that Bruni is a liberal because he is gay. That’s dumb and demeaning. He also asserts that the only reason that the Bush administration is not avowedly homophobic is because it’s intimidated by openly gay people in the media. Isn’t that a bit presumptive? An alternative theory might be that Bush and Cheney know enough gay people to realize that they cannot be generalized about politically; and decent enough not to reduce someone’s politics to their sexual identity. Maybe Dick Cheney has a better understanding of homosexuality than Bozell because his own daughter is gay, and he respects and loves her. For the record, I think that most of the big media are indeed pro-gay, compared to the center of gravity in the rest of the country. But that doesn’t justify the out-dated generalizations and assumptions of Brent Bozell.
The Dish 