Who does Michael Kinsley think his audience is?

[BurtWorm]

Poll question: Who does Michael Kinsley think his audience is?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/10/AR2005061001705.html

No Smoking Gun

By Michael Kinsley

Sunday, June 12, 2005; Page B09

After about the 200th e-mail from a stranger demanding that I cease my personal coverup of something called the Downing Street Memo, I decided to read it. It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq the year before he did so. The whole "weapons of mass destruction" concern was phony from the start, and the drama about inspections was just kabuki: going through the motions.

Although it is flattering to be thought personally responsible for allowing a proven war criminal to remain in office, in the end I don't buy the fuss. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it, as an encouraging sign of the revival of the left. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the widely shared self-discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it.

It takes, in short, what Hillary Clinton once called a vast conspiracy. The right has enjoyed one for years. Even moderate and reasonable right-wingers have enjoyed the presence of a mass of angry people even further right. This overhang of extremists makes the moderates appear more reasonable. It pulls the center of politics, where the media try to be and where compromises on particular issues end up, in a rightward direction. Listening to extreme views on your own side is soothing even if you would never express them and may not even believe them yourself....

[AverageJoe]

1. MK is a whore for *

just like the rest of the sorry mess of MSM personalities in Occupied America.

[BurtWorm]

4. I think he's actually a useful idiot, more than a whore.

I think Bob Somerby (who is wrong, in my opinion, about Dean) is dead on about Kinsley when he calls him a millionaire fop. Kinsley is part of the fabric of the ruling class. When the ruling class is threatened by an "angry," "obsessive" "mob," it doesn't matter if you vote for Democrats, you circle the wagons with your fellow elite.

[AverageJoe]

7. Fair enough

but that seems to make him a slut for *, then. He does it because he wants to, not because he's paid to....

[Ron Green]

2. Other: Imagined lizard people who are the true leaders of Earth.

[marylanddem]

3. What a disappointment

I used to think he had some brains instead of shit for them.

[Protagoras]

5. I believe he thinks of himself as an "enlightened libereral"

but what he has become is one of those overly cautious, power-player wannabes who's so scared of being called a "Conspiracy Theorist" that he'd chew off his own leg to escape it.

Every time I hear him lately I'm reminded of Joe Biden responding to Randi Rhodes about why he can't SIMPLY say * Lied...."Why do you have to do the hard thing?"

Speaking truth to power would jeopardize their cushy lifestyle....not gonna do it.

[acmejack]

6. The answer is obviously "other"

for IDIOTS! I am getting thoroughly pissed off at smug arrogant cretins (edited to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of a few, it doesn't have the same ring as certain bodily orifices. But the man truly is an anal aperture, sorry!) like kinsley, trying to discredit the proof of high crimes and felonies.

[kodi]

8. his audience is us, he is trying to manufacture consent with his words

a long time ago, my daddy told me never to trust anyone with a mortgage.

Kinsley is writing for those mortgage holders who want stability above all else.

bourgeoisie all the way.

[firefox]

9. Strange choice of words Michael

Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them.
Saying paranoid theory is extremely strange. How is this "paranoid theory" stated in words- "Bush was determined to attack Iraq and announced choice intellignce while ignoring intelligence that hurt his propaganda." Wasn't it Bu$h promoting a paranoid theory for reason to start his illegal war? There is nothing extreme in calling for reality instead of the fantasy continually projected by the government. We have a drug war to compare the marketing of the War on Terror.

The guy is delusional or manipulative one.

Here is an important article with a former CIA agent that relocated under a "freedom" program to Sweden- http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/022203D.htm Here are two paragraphs from that article.

***"Free at last!" Williams exclaimed to a reporter as he sat on his front porch and waved to new neighbors. "I was stuck in a totalitarian bureaucracy for 14 months. What a relief it is to say in public who I am and what I think."

***"I can assure you," Williams told Swedish viewers, "that no one at CIA believes a word Bush said. What's more, no one at CIA believes that Bush believes a word Bush said."

[sandnsea]

10. Too smart to agree with the masses

Or have the masses reach the correct conclusions before he did. He says the memo doesn't prove anything because it was a foregone conclusion by journalists that we were going to go to war anyway? What kind of logic is that?

And what kind of inquisitive mind didn't even bother to read that memo for over a month anyway?

[bpilgrim]

11. Hey, Mike... it's still the OFFICIAL STORY in YOUR WORLD, hello...

i bet he is just ducky with that though... if us sheeple are just waking up to the fact that we were LIED TO WAR then 'fuck'm', eh?

is that what they - cause it ain't just Mike - are saying when they use the LAME, imho, reasoning that we all KNOW they FIXED the WAR & LIED to weTHEpeople a loooong time ago?

they have all moved on, i guess :cry:

peace