The Rittenhouse Review notes
And this quote is just terrific: “One regular source of this sort of complaint was Kevin Drum, the in-house blogger of [t]he Washington Monthly and something of a clearinghouse for smart liberals on the web.”
Yes, there’s Kevin Drum. There’s always the not-very-photogenic Kevin Drum.
Yes, he thinks he’s a liberal. Yes, conservatives think he’s a liberal. Yes, he likes that conservatives think he’s a liberal.
But do you know what?
Kevin Drum is not a liberal.
No, he certainly is not a liberal. I would call him more of a schmuck, in the Zell Miller school of pseudo-Democrats even. For a while, Calpundit was on my 'reading' list, and briefly at WashingtonMonthly, but then the whole Daily Kos smear happened, and subsequent slams on other bloggers, not to mention Drum consistently taking political positions to the right of whiney-Joe Lieberman. Bleh.
Update: from comments at Rittenhouse (which I really should read more frequently)
Yeah, eventually against the Iraq war, that's doesn't redeem Kevin Drum for me. I've never felt Kevin was anything but an opportunist on the Left because the field was easier to get into at the time he started blogging, which was about two months before I did. His niche is that, yes, he's on the Left, but he's got such a lofty perspective on, well, everything, he can spout these ideas without actually supporting them or being willing to fight for them. Because it gets him where he's going, he talks the talk without walking the walk and in my book, that's bullshit.One of the things I was truly looking forward to in a Kerry win was not having to close ranks with Kevin and his careerism. But, y'know, fuck that. Kevin has never closed ranks with me, so I'm not going to worry about it. Besides Kevin certainly doesn't need my support, I'll save it for people how see through him, like Jim.
If the Left is going to rebuild, it's going to have to take a long, hard look at what it has to rebuild with. Guys like Kevin Drum will take all the credit while remaining unbiased, thereby sawing the supports out from under whatever we build so they can look even better and oh, so wise for seeing that it would all fail. Or that it would all succeed! You see, that's the miracle of remaining unbiased, it's like beige; you can't be wrong.
Is this really what we want to go into the worst fight of the next century against the insane Right with? Beige?
...Ginger Mayerson
www.hackenblog.com
and the one thing I'll agree that Drum followed that was useful, the AWOL story, as commented by Paul Lukasiak...
As Ginger has implied, Kevin is an "Orange County Liberal"---which places him somewhere to the left of Ronald Reagan, and that's about it.Kevin did perform one important service---bringing AWOL back into the public consciousness---(getting most of his facts wrong, but hey, he eventually figured it out!).
But Kevin's most recent post on Social Security reform shows exactly how "not a liberal" he really is---he actually suggested replacing the payroll tax with a value added tax. "Liberals" know there is no Social Security crisis---that the crisis was created whole cloth by the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Ultimately, Kevin's problem is that he buys into conservative myths, then tries to come up with "liberal" solutions to solve the "problems" whose existence is based on those myths.
# posted by p.lukasiak :
