And I mean it. Fuck a bunch of Mark A. Kleiman. Fuck him and feed him fishheads.
Kleiman, pearls firmly clenched, does his “civility please” schtick yet again, this time in ostensible defence of Ana Marie Cox, whom both Atrios and Digby had attacked with some substantial snark:
Atrios is mad at Ana Marie Cox for her column about the Colbert performance at the White House Correspondents Association dinner. Well, Atrios is always mad at someone, isn’t he? He seems to share with George W. Bush the sincere and passionate belief that anyone who disagrees with him must be A Bad Person. (And would someone please send him a dictionary so he can look up the term “wanker”?)
Atrios links to Digby at Hullabaloo, who provides a detailed fisking of Cox’s column. Digby’s point seems to be that Cox is acting like an insider journalist, thus betraying her Web roots. Or something. (“Our little Wonkette is all grown up.” Do I hear the voice of condescending envy, with just a touch of misogyny?)
[snip]
Several commenters think the above is unfair to Atrios. I’m not cricizing him for being angry; Lord knows, I hate BushCo about as much as one can on an outpatient basis. I’m criticizing him, and Digby, for attacking Cox personally for her failure to join the chorus on this one occasion, despite Cox’s well-established Blue credentials. As to “wanker,” of course Atrios knows its original meaning, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed its obvious inappropriateness as applied to a female.
Second update Atrios, responding to my suggestion that he tends to personally denigrate people who disagree with him rather than responding to their ideas, helpfully suggests that my criticism of his post results from my illiteracy. I’d like to thank him for providing evidence for my point.
In response to comments, I’ve changed “male chauvinism” to “misogyny.”
I’ve edited the comments, not to remove criticisms of me or the post but in accord with our published “play nice” rules of engagement. If you feel the urge to read reams of obscene abuse directed my way, let me refer you to the comments on the second Atrios post. Most of the obscene abuse directed at Ana Marie Cox is in the comments to the original post.
There it all is in one nut’s shell. Take note, aspiring pundits. In Kleiman’s complaint, you witness all the qualifications on display to gain one entree to the sacred halls of Sensible Liberalism, like Joe Lieberman Weekly or The American Prospect or Washington Monthly. There’s the general moral tepidness under the flimsy affected heroism, the demand for “standards” of tone and style, a faint whiff of delusions of persecution; then, finally, the whining.
Anyway, the part after the snip, by which I mean the part heavy on whining, was an update posted in response to this post by Atrios:
Y Kant Kleiman Read?
Better reading comprehension next time, Mark.
Which was pithy in the Atrios style. So let me elaborate on just why Kleiman sucks, not merely in this instance but in general — why, as a pundit, Mark A. Kleiman is worse than useless and isn’t fit to pick corn out of the turds of pundits whose tone and style he finds so offensive.
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