Why Must I Put Myself Through This?

Reading Mickey Kaus makes my eyes bleed. Nonetheless, I can’t seem to stop. . .

Mickey has been driven batshit insane by the Form 180 non-revelations. Mickey’s deep hatred of John Kerry led him to believe that the military records must have contained evidence of treasonous, dishonorable, baby-killing, and genuinely impolite behavior on Kerry’s part. The failure of the records to indicate any such thing has put Mickey in a tough spot. Rubbing his three brain cells together, he has managed to come up with the following:

Why Southern California Suffers: Could the LAT really have been granted coveted access to Kerry’s military records and not reported the part about his grades? Why, yes! … Sen. Stennis had nothin’ on Times reporter Stephen Braun. … Or maybe the LAT’s editors decided we didn’t really need to read about that–too interesting! … Or maybe the paper didn’t cover it because it was already on TV! … P.S.: Braun does say he viewed a “180-page sheaf” of records, which may or may not answer Polipundit’s query. … P.P.S.: Note that this release to the LAT does not come from the government but from “Kerry’s Senate office.” … 3:51 P.M.

Nicely brings together Mickey’s dueling LA Times and Kerry obsessions. The grades nonsense should also help put to rest any notion that Kerry ought to have released the records during the campaign. The actual content of the records is irrelevant; any information will be interpreted and remade by the right wing noise machine in the most detrimental possible light to the Democrat. Rather than treating the records as an account of a genuinely heroic American, their central “revelation” has been that John Kerry got bad grades and looked funny. You can’t please these people; there’s no point in trying.

Mickey’s dishonesty knows no bounds. In the absence of any evidence of Kerry wrong-doing, he falls back on the old “Kerry was a bad candidate” standard:

More important–because Dionne does acknowledge some deeper Dem problems–even if Kerry is history, a Quayle-like dead man walking, the conditions that led Democrats to delude themselves into thinking he was a plausible candidate are still in place and still a problem.

I’m talking about a) The dutiful, clueless susceptibility of liberalism’s main organ, the New York Times, to the elite appeal of a manifest phony like Kerry; b) The cocooning echo chamber of wishful-thinking self-reinforcement that led so many Democratic opinion-shapers to actually believe everything Paul Krugman was writing about the economy, to believe in the primacy of the “wrong track” numbers–in short, that led even highly sophisticated MSM politicos (like those at the Note) to believe the spin that the underlying dynamics of the election were hostile to Bush, hence the race was “Kerry’s contest to lose.” c) The semi-conscious Emperor’s-Clothes-like suspension of normal powers of judgment, lest you write or say something in public that might be seen as aiding Bush. …

Without these blinders, the Liberal Media might have noticed the bad joke aspects of Kerry’s candidacy and saved their party from a nominee who everyone now recognizes as fatally flawed. Is there any guarantee they won’t make the same mistake again in 2008?

Mickey is getting his right wing talking points mixed up. Kerry, the most liberal candidate for a presidential election since 1964, received 49% of the vote against an incumbent Republican during a war under decent economic conditions. Any reasonable commentator would suggest that this is a fair showing, and that the nomination of said candidate cannot really be considered an outright disaster. Mickey will have none of it, however. He’s a Democrat who hates Democrats, who approves of George Bush’s economic policies, and who favored George Bush’s war. Something must explain Kerry’s defeat, and Mickey wants to make it Kerry’s personal style and campaign tactics. However, it really would be remarkable if a candidate ideologically out of touch (too liberal), wrong on the issues (criticizing the war), personally distasteful (elite Massachusetts aristocrat), and a terrible campaigner (why didn’t he release the Form 180 that would have destroyed his campaign etc. etc.) lost by only two points.

Worst. Blogger. Ever.