Breaking! Mickey Kaus Figures Out Politics! Must Credit!

Mickey Kaus, political genius, has just now figured out that the cost-control approach has the collateral benefit of pre-empting the kind of ridiculous budget critics that you would totally expect to oppose health care reform of the exact kind that Mickey Kaus keeps proposing. But!

If all you had to do is appease the Blue Dogs and AARP, the strategy might be sound. The problem is that the IMAC "game changer" scares the daylights out of lots of people, and adds to the ballast of the whole package with the general public.

If you're scoring at home, or even if you're alone: who do you think counts as "lots of people" in that link there? Any guesses?

How about ... David Broder! You know ... David Broder? The "voice of the people"? Or was that a joke? I mean, it's not like Mickey has been using David Broder as a punchline for years now [Wait a minute, that last post is from 2004 and Mickey is making an Austin Powers joke ... shouldn't he be prohibited from making fun of anyone for any reason? -- ed. Groovy, baby! High five! Ka-ching!]. And it's certainly not as though Mickey has been portraying him for years now as a fusty, condescending walking embodiment of the MSM dinosaurs. Heavens, no!

I'd make a snide "any weapon to hand" joke here, but, seriously, if Mickey Kaus is approvingly quoting David Broder in order to defeat a sensible health care reform policy, we've pretty much arrived at the end of days, and it's all shotguns and duct tape from here on in.

Good luck, and watch out for the zombies!

Mickey's Persistent State

Um, what?

Peggy Noonan is on to something potentially big--the possible alliance between Christian pro-life forces and liberal universal health insurance advocates in favor of broadly available life-saving care ... and the potential fight between that alliance and the cost-saving Orszag end-of-life-rationalizing would-you-please-die-now crowd. ...

Wow, Lady Peggy Noonington actually broke a story about this emerging political alliance? Let's see what Her Majesty wrote:

A good portion of the support for national health care comes from a sort of European Christian Democrat spirit of community, of “We are all in this together.” This spirit potentially unites Democrats, leftists, some Republicans and GOP populists, the politically unaffiliated and those of whatever view with low incomes.

So, Peggy Noonan thinks that a "good portion" -- which, according to the latest advanced statistics, is slightly less than a "heaping helping" and slightly more than a "fair share" -- of public support for health care is from a "spirit" that "potentially" unites Mother Jones Readers and John Hagee Megachurchers, or at least it would have if Democrats hadn't foolishly extended universal health care to cover lady parts.

From that solidly reasoned and totally verifiable set of data points, Mickey boldly predicts that leftists -- craven opportunists that they are -- will reevaluate their sneering-rific position on ... wait for it ... Terri Schiavo.

Prediction: The sneering Dem majority position in the Schiavo case will get a second, skeptical look from at least some liberals.

Really? Terri Schiavo? Hasn't this been settled already? Doesn't everyone agree that the Republicans dramatically miscalculated by taking the hugely unpopular position that the government should intervene to keep alive a seriously brain-damaged person who has been in a vegetative state for fifteen years in order to nakedly pander to an increasingly unhinged religious right desperate to open a new front in the culture war? Who on Earth could argue that the Democrats made a huge mistake there?

Hey, I think they're playing Mickey's theme music ...

[S]houldn't left-wingers be pro-tubists? .... Has their political and moral sense been so twisted by the hard dogma of "abortion rights" (and disdain for fundamentalist Christians) that they don't see this?

Ha, so the alliance of the sneering left and the religious right will lead to ... people admitting that Mickey Kaus was right all along?

Prediction: the "political and moral sense" of Mickey Kaus will be subjected to much, much more sneering.

Not Nearly As Convincing As A String Of Unverified Assertions, Anyway ...

1. Mickey has qualms about the marketing and potential cost-cutting measures of Obama's health care initiative.

2. Obama's health care initiative, though popular with the public, seems poised to go down to defeat because the Ben Nelsons of the world are vainglorious idiots who seize upon any increase in government spending as a reason to scuttle Democratic policies.

Now, Mickey doesn't have any evidence connecting #1 to #2 -- he must have left it in his other pants -- but that doesn't stop him. Mickey's patented brand of deductive reasoning tells him that health care reform is faltering precisely because ... of the things Mickey doesn't like about it. [Is that narcissistic or solipsistic? I can never remember the difference. -- ed. Narcissistic. A solipsist wouldn't invent a fictitious editor.] Mickey goes on to blame this crazy focus on cost-cutting on -- what else? -- the Democratic centrists described in paragraph 2 above who are using cost as a pretext for selling out to insurance companies a high-brow magazine for coastal elites!

All seemingly on the basis of a single article in the New Yorker that isn't nearly as convincing as it's made out to be.

Those of us who aren't veteran Kausfiles Konnoisseurs would expect a takedown, or even a link to a takedown, of the New Yorker article that basically destroys Mickey's position. But that would be too easy, so Mickey uses the article (on health care, remember) to take a nonsensical swipe at Democrat orthodoxy on education spending, and leaves it at that. What a pro!

I mean, it's not like he's just lazily repeating himself in every post and trying to wish that article (and the evidence against his poorly thought out position) away so that he can continue to attack a sensible liberal health care reform plan by repeating right-wing talking points verbatim and pretending that he's arguing in good faith, right?

Of course not. He'll roll out that great rebuttal any day now.

Any day now.

I Blame The Bling

Mickey, master of nuance, on the Gates incident:

And at that point Gates has already determined he's been treated unfairly. He's already refusing to answer questions and planning to file a complaint. Again, from his own words it looks like he rushes a bit to the conclusion that a white man in a similar situation would have been treated differently. Is that really true? I'm not saying that Gates wasn't stereotyped in a deeply annoying and disturbing way. Just saying the stereotypes can run boths ways.

See, Mickey's not just saying that the cop didn't stereotype Gates unfairly, he's just saying that Gates might have stereotyped himself as the kind of person that gets treated unfairly, which -- to reiterate -- Mickey's not just saying he wasn't. See?

Huh?

Wronger Faster

I'm sure that this is all just a big part of the SEIU's evil plan to springboard off the health care debate into getting card check. Now it might look like a bunch of moderate Democrats have dropped the card check provision for the sake of getting a labor law bill passed, and "the possibility of trading some health care provisions for card check in some sort of gruesome grand bargain" was an incredibly stupid bit of punditry by somebody completely unconnected from reality, but you just don't understand Washington kabuki like Mickey.

You see, in addition to pressuring Senators on the public option, the SEIU has also endorsed Sonia Sotomayor, which means they want to use their support for her nomination with the White House to water down the public option on health care in exchange for support from the Money Liberals on the Bring Back Welfare Act of 2009, which, in turn ...

[SUDDEN BURST OF WHITE NOISE]

... powerful Latino lobby and potential use of mind control on Ben Nelson, who ...

[LINE SUDDENLY GOES DEAD]

... that would cause Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln to swap their votes on the cap-and-trade bill for a promise not to attack on the next two turns ...

[SCENE MISSING]

... 4 ... 8 ... 15 ... 16 ...

[AIRPLANE FLIES OVERHEAD]

... until the handle breaks off, and Barbara Mikulski has to go get a doctor to pull it back out again.

Voila! 60 votes for cloture on card check!

It's all so simple.

Say

Remember when Democrats gunned down Miguel Estrada in front of his family?

That was awful.

Ugh

Apologies for the long delay, as forces beyond my control [Laziness is beyond your control? -- ed. Man, I am so sick of that guy ... why can't I have Mickey's editor?] have conspired to keep me from blogging.

For your Kausfiles Komedy fix, however, just read and re-read this post from last week where Mickey -- already prone to fever dreams regarding just how the SEIU (pronounced "Iago") plans to trick the Senate into passing card check and wrecking the American economy (er ... more so) -- speculates that the SEIU plans to turn unnamed health care provisions (?) into support for card check (??) from moderate Senate democrats (???) through a process involving annoyance at left-wing grass-roots groups (????) and avoidance of the dreaded Senate kabuki (?????).

I was going originally going to call this pile of flailing idiocy "Mickey's patented brand of paranoid political alchemy", but I realized that comparing Mickey's political strategery to alchemy is kind of an insult to alchemy.

Andrew Young Also Has A Bridge He'd Like To Sell You

In reviewing a gossip column item about John Edwards' former aide's tell-all book -- you know, media criticism -- Mickey spots something that they seem to have missed:

Rush & Molloy bury the lede--Obama's alleged promise to make Edwards Attorney General. ...

Well, it should be noted that the sources for this alleged promise, aside from Mickey himself, are ... Robert Novak (!), John Edwards, and now John Edwards again, only this time via somebody scummy enough to pass off John Edwards' love child as his own.

I would mock Mickey for relying on chronic fabricators with blatantly obvious agendas, but considering the typical quality of Mickey's sources, this is comparatively rock solid.

[Look, if you can't trust pathetic hacks desperately trying to spin you, how are you supposed to get the all-important undernews? -- ed. Ask around at Cafe Milano?]

Kausfiles Paranoia: Ten Years

Mickey's got me in the nostalgic spirit, so how about this one from 2003:

Not one, not two, but three plugs in a NYT Arts-front-page "Critic's Notebook" for a semi-obscure band, Galactic, whose guitarist is Howell Raines' son! What I wouldn't have given for this item two weeks ago! ...

This particular post appeared not one, not two, but three years after numerous hippies with terrible taste in music recommended to me the music of Galactic, a kind of String Cheese Incident for a more southern palate.

Mickey, of course, assumed that this coverage was a result of Howell Raines just cold spiking every music and arts story that didn't involve his son. You see, Raines was the most obvious outlet for Mickey's sublimely stupid theory of a dominant liberal MSM (MSM here meaning any source that fails to recognize Mickey's genius and n.b. that by this definition the MSM is roughly 99.9% of the internet) and therefore, despite Raines' efforts to turn the New York Times into a mouthpiece for Bush's Iraq propaganda (a rather inconvenient subject that Mickey has largely avoided except when he can use it to make fun of Floyd Abrams), Mickey considered Raines to be an unreconstructed Charles-Foster-Kane-esque influence-peddling liberal desperate to mold public opinion to his favor ...

... by pimping his son's already-moderately-popular jam band.

Ten years, everyone!