In 2003 he wrote this? While Molly fucking Ivins was still alive? That’s some impressive delusionality.

While I personally find bloggers–certain bloggers, among whom those do not count–more influential than newspaper columnists, I daresay the rest of the country spends more time with Mark Morford and Carl Hiaasen and, yes, even Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman, than they do with blogs. The statement reveals an upper-middle-class can’t-imagine-anybody-doesn’t-live-like-I-do, time-on-your-hands mentality. It is, in this day and age, elitist. Maybe it shouldn’t be, maybe bloggers should be available to all freely, even if you can’t afford a dead tree paper, but that’s not how the free market seems to be working.

Meanwhile, while I find the thought that the Times has editorial standards heartening if not also improbable, I have to agree with No More Mr Nice Blog, among others, who feels that they damned well should have just printed the stupid thing. It seems like it’s worth hearing the genuinely stupid ideas our would-be president has to offer, and hearing them couched in, let’s face it, the *best possible way*. The fact that even that, presumably written by his smarter staffers, was too pathetic to print, says something, and that something should have been available to us all when making our choice. You might as well flip the steak over so the maggots don’t show and then tell us you’re protecting us from poor quality food while you sell it to us anyway. Standards or no, this is stuff we need to see so we can decide if we want to take it home with us for the next four years.

heh.

Oh, and can we *please* stop hearing from all the wingtards about how someone pissed on their parade once, too? It’s right up there with their “I feel your pain” when a family looses a loved one who actually, you know, bothered to serve in the great war to resubjugate the brown people, as opposed to blogging about it from the little cubicle behind the furnace in mommy’s basement.

Honestly, what has Mickey Kaus done that has been influential (before or since 2003)? Will we learn years from now that

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct goat blower. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some blower of goats of a few years back.

And he wrote an essay saying mainstream journalists are dinosaurs on the slow road to marginal relevance (if not outright extinction)?

And they rejected it?

I’m with Simon — what’s not hilarious about that?