Kaus Patrol

Archives The Unreliable Narrator Return to Paul's Place kausfiles.com Why Pick on Mick? *“I've just discovered Kaus Patrol. I'm hoping that many more will do the same.”* --Joe Conason, author, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth and not a word about Jack Kelley
kaus patrol Keeping tabs on Slate’s most dishonest contributor. By Paul H. Henry Friday, June 11, 2004 Shocker: Kaus calls the latest Los Angeles Times congressional poll, showing the Democrats ahead by 19 points on a generic congressional ballot, a "shock," bolstering his histrionic headline with criticism from Bush pollster Matthew Dowd--say, there's an unbiased observer! Both Dowd and Kaus, two peas in a pod, use a lot of smoke and hand waving to put the best face on the Republicans' showing in the poll. (Maybe all the phone surveyors, every last one of them, were "Latinas with exacting NPR-style Spanish accents"! Okay, Mickey.) But even Kaus can't avoid passing along Times pollster Susan Pinkus' citation of a recent ABC News poll showing Democrats leading Republicans by 10 points--a lot less than 19, but still in double digits. He might also have looked at the Time/CNN congressional poll released last month, showing Democrats leading Republicans by 13 points. Contrast that with the only other survey pollingreport.com lists as having been released within the last 30 days, a Democracy Corps poll showing Democrats leading Republicans by only 2 points, and it starts to look a lot like that poll, not the Times poll, is the outlier. This could all mean any number of things, but I can't help but read Kaus' "cute" subhed over and over again: "kf makes a phone call--always a mistake!" Here at Patrol headquarters we trust that Kaus will now return to form and make no effort to research anything he writes, ever again. 10:42 AM comments (1) \| link \| TrackBack (0) Thursday, June 3, 2004 Ladykiller: Kaus observes that Dan Drezner observes that "Kaus disappears entirely" from the list of top political blogs read by women, according to Drezner's recent survey. Gee, I wonder why? 10:38 AM comments (1) \| link \| TrackBack (0) Friday, May 28, 2004 Kaus Patrol Precinct Report: TAPPED, Roger Ailes, and Atrios destroy Kaus' suggestion that John Kerry has flip-flopped on the issue of American troops in Iraq. and that Sandy Berger was somehow "embarrassed" when he defended Kerry's consistency on the issue. Writes TAPPED's Matt Yglesias: Another school of thought, to which Kerry adhered, was that ceding control [to the United Nations in fall 2003] was the right way to go. On the one hand, it would get us more troops, and on the other hand it would increase the mission's political legitimacy. Kerry, in other words, has been "consistently right on the need for troops" in Iraq which, if you look at it, is exactly what Berger said. So why the switch from more foreign troops to more American troops? Well, there was a third school of thought represented by George W. Bush, who exercized his patented strong leadership in times of change by refusing to acknowledge that the problem existed at all. As a result, the situation continued to deteriorate. Eventually, things got so bad that Bush was forced to cede political control to the UN in exchange for nothing at all. So right now, gaining many more international troops is off the table and so Kerry's no longer counting on that. His positioned changed, in other words, when the circumstances changed. Bush, on the other hand, stuck with his original fantasyland plan until it was far too late, and eventually wound up accepting the worst of both worlds. So, to sum up: Kaus says Kerry has been inconsistent and Berger is wrong, when in fact Kerry has been consistent and Berger is right. Easy mistake to make. If you're Kaus. 2:44 PM comments (1) \| link \| TrackBack (0) Tuesday, May 18, 2004 Uh... To Look Nice, Perhaps?: Fellas, when your sweetheart puts on a nice dress in preparation for a night on the town with you, remember to tell her how pretty she looks! Otherwise you might appear to be as stunningly ignorant about women as Mickey Kaus, who, perhaps feeling a little sullen after being slapped around by another blogger in the wake of his misogynistic comments about Alexandra Kerry this weekend, responds thusly: "It's not clear to me that this dress would have much of a purpose if it wasn't intended to be seen through." Words fail me. 2:24 PM comments (0) \| link \| TrackBack (0) Sunday, May 16, 2004 The Sins of the Daughter: Not being content to wage his hysterical, largely incoherent jihad against John Kerry, Kaus now trains his guns on the man's daughter. (Why waste time on Abu Ghraib when we could all be talking about Alexandra Kerry?) Did she get arrested for drunk driving, perhaps? Or for trying to buy beer with a fake ID? No. She wore a dress that let you see her boobies: I guess Kerry really is writing off the South!... Hello? Do Americans want a first daughter who parades around in a dress Paris Hilton would be embarrassed to wear ? And shouldn't she have, you know, thought of that? ... P.S.: Could she be what these pictures suggest--a bit vain, selfish and opportunistic? John Kerry's daugher, of all people! (I commend the photograph in question to any and all, by the way. Yowza! It hardly seems necessary to point out that if a photograph likes this makes the South write off Kerry, then the South can, and should, go fuck itself.) Alexandra Kerry is old enough to take care of herself, of course, but it's pretty foul of Kaus, whom I'd never previously considered a misogynist, to infer so much about the woman's character from the dress she wore in a photograph--isn't that the kind of mindset we're supposedly fighting a War on Terror against? Of course, it's not really Alexandra Kerry's character Kaus is after, it's her father's, as he makes clear. If that's a fair criticism, though, isn't it also a fair criticism to level against George W. Bush, whose daughter Jenna was arrested for exactly the crimes I mentioned in the first paragraph? If we're going to judge a man by how well his daughters turn out, then John Kerry--whose daughter is exhibiting a short film at Cannes this week--is ten times the man that George W. Bush, who managed to raise a pair of alcohol-besotted Texas cracker princesses with entitlement complexes, will ever be. Number of times the words "Jenna Bush" have appeared in kausfiles, incidentally: 0. I'm sure that's just an oversite that a man of integrity like Mickey Kaus, who's not at all a BIG STINKING HYPOCRITE or anything like that, will rectify as soon as possible. 11:25 PM comments (0) \| link \| TrackBack (0) Saturday, May 15, 2004 Surreal People: Konspiracy-minded Kaus explains why he hates stories with "real people" in them--it's because every goddamn one of them is actually a shill for the liberal policy groups that wield such great power in America today: An Editor's Note reveals the dirty little secret about where the New York Times finds those ordinary citizens sprinkled throughout public policy pieces to complain in homespun fashion about the dire effect of this budget cut or that government initiative: they are handed to the Times on a platter by (liberal) advocacy groups. Gee, no wonder they act like trained seals! Kaus is apoplectic that the Times did not initially disclose that the names of two of the article's interviewees, elderly folks who're being jackhammered by prescription drug prices, had been supplied to the newspaper's reporter by a left-of-center advocacy group. That's a fair criticism. If the thrust of the article--that the bewildering array of drug discount cards available through the administration's new Medicare regulations is confusing and counterproductive for the average recipient--is essentially correct, then the lack of disclosure doesn't really matter, because anyone the reporter interviews is likely to give a similar answer. But if the two interviewees are atypical, omitting the disclosure could give the reader a misleading impression as to the response of the average Medicare beneficiary to the new rules. Either way, it's probably best to disclose the relevant details and let the reader decide for herself how much weight to give the words of each interviewee. Score a point for Kaus. Unfortunately, we must then rescind the point about three screens later on the page, when we come to Kaus' Wednesday entry: ABC's The Note, which I love, discusses Jill Lawrence's USA Today piece surveying Kerry skeptics, including Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Donna Brazile and the editor of kf. I would love The Note too, if they would ever pimp stuff I've written. (Gimme a call, Halperin!) I assume, though, that Kaus only cites The Note here as a way to backdoor a reference to the USA Today piece without seeming too blatantly self-promoting (an entirely unsuccessful strategy, if true). Let's have a look at what USAT's Lawrence says about Mickey: Despite Bush's difficult stretch, most polls show the presidential race tied. Kerry's inability to break away, along with perceived missteps by him and his campaign, has fueled so many critiques that online commentator Mickey Kaus of Slate has started a ''Dem Panic Watch'' -- a catalog of columns and stories about everything from Kerry team infighting to advice to lighten up. ''I've always thought Kerry was a terrible candidate,'' Kaus, a Democrat, said in an interview. ''I think he is proving that . . . now. Democrats are definitely panicking.'' So Kaus, like Lyndon LaRouche, apparently still calls himself a Democrat, and if we were so supremely fortunate as to be unfamiliar with the Kaus oeuvre, these paragraphs might lead us to believe that he is somebody who should be taken seriously as a Democratic partisan. In fact, Kaus is the kind of "Democrat" who regularly cadges from right-wing buttmunches like James Taranto, his source for the aforementioned NYT screed. Citing Kaus as an example of internecine sniping within the Democratic party is like citing Dan Savage, a registered Republican, to demonstrate that the GOP is rent with deep divisions itself. Kaus himself intentionally contributes to this misleading message by alleging, without proof, that "Democrats are definitely panicking," when to all appearances exactly the opposite is true. So, to sum up: Failing to disclose significant details about an interviewee's possible motives in a news story is bad. Unless the interviewee's motives are to discredit John Kerry by any means necessary. Then it's okay! 3:16 PM comments (0) \| link \| TrackBack (0)

“I've just discovered Kaus Patrol. I'm hoping that many more will do the same.”

--Joe Conason, author, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth

kaus patrol Keeping tabs on Slate’s most dishonest contributor.

By Paul H. Henry

Friday, June 11, 2004

Shocker: Kaus calls the latest Los Angeles Times congressional poll, showing the Democrats ahead by 19 points on a generic congressional ballot, a "shock," bolstering his histrionic headline with criticism from Bush pollster Matthew Dowd--say, there's an unbiased observer! Both Dowd and Kaus, two peas in a pod, use a lot of smoke and hand waving to put the best face on the Republicans' showing in the poll. (Maybe all the phone surveyors, every last one of them, were "Latinas with exacting NPR-style Spanish accents"! Okay, Mickey.)

But even Kaus can't avoid passing along Times pollster Susan Pinkus' citation of a recent ABC News poll showing Democrats leading Republicans by 10 points--a lot less than 19, but still in double digits. He might also have looked at the Time/CNN congressional poll released last month, showing Democrats leading Republicans by 13 points. Contrast that with the only other survey pollingreport.com lists as having been released within the last 30 days, a Democracy Corps poll showing Democrats leading Republicans by only 2 points, and it starts to look a lot like that poll, not the Times poll, is the outlier.

This could all mean any number of things, but I can't help but read Kaus' "cute" subhed over and over again: "kf makes a phone call--always a mistake!" Here at Patrol headquarters we trust that Kaus will now return to form and make no effort to research anything he writes, ever again. 10:42 AM
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Thursday, June 3, 2004

Ladykiller: Kaus observes that Dan Drezner observes that "Kaus disappears entirely" from the list of top political blogs read by women, according to Drezner's recent survey. Gee, I wonder why? 10:38 AM
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Friday, May 28, 2004

Kaus Patrol Precinct Report: TAPPED, Roger Ailes, and Atrios destroy Kaus' suggestion that John Kerry has flip-flopped on the issue of American troops in Iraq. and that Sandy Berger was somehow "embarrassed" when he defended Kerry's consistency on the issue. Writes TAPPED's Matt Yglesias:

Another school of thought, to which Kerry adhered, was that ceding control [to the United Nations in fall 2003] was the right way to go. On the one hand, it would get us more troops, and on the other hand it would increase the mission's political legitimacy. Kerry, in other words, has been "consistently right on the need for troops" in Iraq which, if you look at it, is exactly what Berger said. So why the switch from more foreign troops to more American troops?

Well, there was a third school of thought represented by George W. Bush, who exercized his patented strong leadership in times of change by refusing to acknowledge that the problem existed at all. As a result, the situation continued to deteriorate. Eventually, things got so bad that Bush was forced to cede political control to the UN in exchange for nothing at all. So right now, gaining many more international troops is off the table and so Kerry's no longer counting on that. His positioned changed, in other words, when the circumstances changed. Bush, on the other hand, stuck with his original fantasyland plan until it was far too late, and eventually wound up accepting the worst of both worlds.

So, to sum up: Kaus says Kerry has been inconsistent and Berger is wrong, when in fact Kerry has been consistent and Berger is right. Easy mistake to make. If you're Kaus. 2:44 PM
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Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Uh... To Look Nice, Perhaps?: Fellas, when your sweetheart puts on a nice dress in preparation for a night on the town with you, remember to tell her how pretty she looks! Otherwise you might appear to be as stunningly ignorant about women as Mickey Kaus, who, perhaps feeling a little sullen after being slapped around by another blogger in the wake of his misogynistic comments about Alexandra Kerry this weekend, responds thusly: "It's not clear to me that this dress would have much of a purpose if it wasn't intended to be seen through." Words fail me. 2:24 PM
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Sunday, May 16, 2004

The Sins of the Daughter: Not being content to wage his hysterical, largely incoherent jihad against John Kerry, Kaus now trains his guns on the man's daughter. (Why waste time on Abu Ghraib when we could all be talking about Alexandra Kerry?) Did she get arrested for drunk driving, perhaps? Or for trying to buy beer with a fake ID? No. She wore a dress that let you see her boobies:

I guess Kerry really is writing off the South!... Hello? Do Americans want a first daughter who parades around in a dress Paris Hilton would be embarrassed to wear ? And shouldn't she have, you know, thought of that? ... P.S.: Could she be what these pictures suggest--a bit vain, selfish and opportunistic? John Kerry's daugher, of all people!

(I commend the photograph in question to any and all, by the way. Yowza! It hardly seems necessary to point out that if a photograph likes this makes the South write off Kerry, then the South can, and should, go fuck itself.) Alexandra Kerry is old enough to take care of herself, of course, but it's pretty foul of Kaus, whom I'd never previously considered a misogynist, to infer so much about the woman's character from the dress she wore in a photograph--isn't that the kind of mindset we're supposedly fighting a War on Terror against? Of course, it's not really Alexandra Kerry's character Kaus is after, it's her father's, as he makes clear. If that's a fair criticism, though, isn't it also a fair criticism to level against George W. Bush, whose daughter Jenna was arrested for exactly the crimes I mentioned in the first paragraph? If we're going to judge a man by how well his daughters turn out, then John Kerry--whose daughter is exhibiting a short film at Cannes this week--is ten times the man that George W. Bush, who managed to raise a pair of alcohol-besotted Texas cracker princesses with entitlement complexes, will ever be.

Number of times the words "Jenna Bush" have appeared in kausfiles, incidentally: 0. I'm sure that's just an oversite that a man of integrity like Mickey Kaus, who's not at all a BIG STINKING HYPOCRITE or anything like that, will rectify as soon as possible. 11:25 PM
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Saturday, May 15, 2004

Surreal People: Konspiracy-minded Kaus explains why he hates stories with "real people" in them--it's because every goddamn one of them is actually a shill for the liberal policy groups that wield such great power in America today:

An Editor's Note reveals the dirty little secret about where the New York Times finds those ordinary citizens sprinkled throughout public policy pieces to complain in homespun fashion about the dire effect of this budget cut or that government initiative: they are handed to the Times on a platter by (liberal) advocacy groups. Gee, no wonder they act like trained seals!

Kaus is apoplectic that the Times did not initially disclose that the names of two of the article's interviewees, elderly folks who're being jackhammered by prescription drug prices, had been supplied to the newspaper's reporter by a left-of-center advocacy group. That's a fair criticism. If the thrust of the article--that the bewildering array of drug discount cards available through the administration's new Medicare regulations is confusing and counterproductive for the average recipient--is essentially correct, then the lack of disclosure doesn't really matter, because anyone the reporter interviews is likely to give a similar answer. But if the two interviewees are atypical, omitting the disclosure could give the reader a misleading impression as to the response of the average Medicare beneficiary to the new rules. Either way, it's probably best to disclose the relevant details and let the reader decide for herself how much weight to give the words of each interviewee. Score a point for Kaus.

Unfortunately, we must then rescind the point about three screens later on the page, when we come to Kaus' Wednesday entry:

ABC's The Note, which I love, discusses Jill Lawrence's USA Today piece surveying Kerry skeptics, including Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Donna Brazile and the editor of kf.

I would love The Note too, if they would ever pimp stuff I've written. (Gimme a call, Halperin!) I assume, though, that Kaus only cites The Note here as a way to backdoor a reference to the USA Today piece without seeming too blatantly self-promoting (an entirely unsuccessful strategy, if true). Let's have a look at what USAT's Lawrence says about Mickey:

Despite Bush's difficult stretch, most polls show the presidential race tied. Kerry's inability to break away, along with perceived missteps by him and his campaign, has fueled so many critiques that online commentator Mickey Kaus of Slate has started a ''Dem Panic Watch'' -- a catalog of columns and stories about everything from Kerry team infighting to advice to lighten up.

''I've always thought Kerry was a terrible candidate,'' Kaus, a Democrat, said in an interview. ''I think he is proving that . . . now. Democrats are definitely panicking.''

So Kaus, like Lyndon LaRouche, apparently still calls himself a Democrat, and if we were so supremely fortunate as to be unfamiliar with the Kaus oeuvre, these paragraphs might lead us to believe that he is somebody who should be taken seriously as a Democratic partisan. In fact, Kaus is the kind of "Democrat" who regularly cadges from right-wing buttmunches like James Taranto, his source for the aforementioned NYT screed. Citing Kaus as an example of internecine sniping within the Democratic party is like citing Dan Savage, a registered Republican, to demonstrate that the GOP is rent with deep divisions itself. Kaus himself intentionally contributes to this misleading message by alleging, without proof, that "Democrats are definitely panicking," when to all appearances exactly the opposite is true.

So, to sum up: Failing to disclose significant details about an interviewee's possible motives in a news story is bad. Unless the interviewee's motives are to discredit John Kerry by any means necessary. Then it's okay! 3:16 PM
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