The Dish

Max Blumenthal, Sid’s son, produces a quick YouTube of his impressions. The wheels seem to be coming off the conservative movement in real time:

Here’s how you make a fag joke to conservatives without getting into trouble:

"The representative libertarian of this decade is humorless, intolerant, self-righteous, badly schooled, and dull. At least the oldfangled Russian anarchist was bold, lively, and knew which sex he belonged to."

It’s from Russell Kirk, in the days when conservatives knew how to imply bigotry rather than revel in it.

"This is our first real victory. I congratulate you for overcoming your fear. We will have victory when we get our Russia back. We have 364 days before the election in 2008," – Garry Kasparov, one of the few liberal opponents of Putin’s authoritarian government not to have been assassinated.

Another Putin critic was shot in Washington yesterday. The cuplrits could be local hoodlums or Putin’s thugs. The victim survived, which suggests local hoodlums. Putin’s men tend to get the job done.

A reader writes:

At this moment I am dipping into Hillary’s speech in Selma, after listening to Barack’s sermon. A few week’s ago on Chris Matthew’s Sunday morning show you talked about Hillary’s "cooties," and that crystalized my problem with her. I agree with most of what she stands for, (and I think she does actually stand for things),  but I gag when I listen to her. I cannot, cannot, stand to have her in my living room for four years. I can only hope that the time between now and the primaries is long enough for other democrats to feel the same way. 

On the other hand, Barack Obama’s speech was so well crafted, so graceful in the way it answered unasked questions and deferred anticipated criticisms, so – well, to be honest, inspiring, that I stood up and clapped at the end, in the privacy of my own living room. It has been a very, very, long time since I’ve dared to hope this much about a political figure.

Ah, yes. The audacity of hope.

Domenici begs for forgiveness in the U.S. attorney firings scandal. Josh has the latest.

Wikipedia helps us all out. More here. Ouch.

How do you think Mickey Kaus had almost immediate access to a private email exchange between Ann Coulter and Adam Nagourney, the openly gay NYT reporter Kaus constantly berates? Read this item and ponder: what is Mickey trying to say? He cannot find a shred of evidence that Nagourney has been anything but fair and accurate in his story. But Mickey’s throwing some suspicion around and wants to publish the full email that Coulter sent to Nagourney. The only conceivable point of this is to help Coulter get her full spin out there. But why would a writer already deemed homophobic by some go out of his way to defend a homophobic slur that even the right-wing blogs denounce?

Then you realize that Kaus has been defending Coulter for a very long time, an odd position for a neoliberal Democrat to take. He even defended her when she slandered Kaus’s closest colleague, Bob Wright, last year. Here’s the NYT story on this spat:

A few months ago Ann Coulter, the right-wing thunder bearer, declared on the Fox News program "Hannity & Colmes" that Democrats harbored "affection" for terrorists. She cited as evidence an Op-Ed article in The New York Times by the author and liberal pundit Robert Wright in which he explored Muslim outrage over cartoons in a Danish newspaper, saying he defended the violence that broke out as "justified."

To Mr. Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Ms. Coulter’s assertion constituted an infuriating, willful mischaracterization. He turned for support to his friend, Mickey Kaus (whose blog, Kausfiles, appears on Slate), and did so on bloggingheads.tv, the online forum the two men created six months ago for video simulcast political discussions.

As it turned out, Mr. Kaus was reluctant to demonize Ms. Coulter, rejecting Mr. Wright’s claim that any anatomization of her thinking would logically conclude that she was either (1) "dishonest" or (2) "stupid." Instead Mr. Kaus offered the counter-theory that she was a more or less sensible person whose zealotry often drove her to exaggerate.

This Mr. Wright could not abide. After noting that Mr. Kaus had been seen in Ms. Coulter’s company, he went on to intimate that maybe, possibly, Mr. Kaus thought she was pretty, that perhaps he had a crush.

"I don’t even think she’s good looking," Mr. Wright said. "If you do, fine, but whatever set of motivations is leading you to defend her, I mean, I don’t get it."

I don’t get it either – but it’s been going on for years. Back in 2002, Bob Somerby wrote a post wondering how on earth Kaus had run an item on a spat between Ann Coulter and Katie Couric, taken Coulter’s side, and titled the post "Coulter 1, Couric 0". Somerby asked of Mickey:

Why did Coulter direct you to discuss that exchange?

Mickey, aware of the weirdness of the item, even asked himself in his self-referential style:

[Who fed this to you? Coulter?–ed. Senior officials in the Coulter camp. But it checked out.]

Kaus even defended Coulter’s attack on the 9/11 widows:

Coulter’s comments become much less shocking when read in context (Chapter 4 of Godless, criticizing the press canonization of four highly political, pro-Kerry 9/11 widows).

I could go on, but you can Google the rest. Of course, Mickey has every right to support Coulter, defend her comments, go gratuitously out of his way to present her version of events. But, a question about the Nagourney email:

Who fed this to you? Coulter?–ed.

(Photo: Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly for Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People event, by Evan Agostini/Getty.)

San Jose, California, 12.48 pm.

I vouched for Kimberly Kagan’s academic credentials in linking to her assessment of the progress of the "surge" for the Weekly Standard. I should have disclosed that Kagan is the wife of Frederick Kagan, the principal author of the surge; and his brother is Bob Kagan, another pro-surge advocate and editor at the Weekly Standard, and they’re both sons of Donald Kagan, who is also a neoconservative intellectual. More to the point: Kimberly Kagan is listed as one of the participants in her husband’s research team that came up with the surge in the first place. So when the Weekly Standard decided to compile a regular report on the surge’s progress, they picked the wife of the main author and one of the plan’s original architects. And they never disclosed these relevant facts. So allow me.

It’s twenty years since the publication of "The Closing of the American Mind" – a book that, with the exception of its introduction (which is all that most people read), was for me an exhilarating insight into what it means to be a philosopher. Once you get past the cranky splutterings of the intro, you get to see one of America’s greatest intellectuals talk about some of the West’s greatest minds. It remains a classic in my book – something every curious young conservative-inclined student should read, and read again. Here’s a gloomy paleocon take. What a decline – from the days when Bloom sold millions to the days when Coulter rules.