Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (If We Could Unsubscribe from Slate, We Would Edition)
Yes, it is another edition of Mickey Kaus, hack journalist for Slate.
NASA's James Hansen writes:
James Hansen: There's a huge gap between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known about global warming by those who need to know: the public and policy-makers. We've had, in the past thirty years, one degree Fahrenheit of global warming. But there's another one degree Fahrenheit in the pipeline due to gases that are already in the atmosphere. And there's another one degree Fahrenheit in the pipeline because of the energy infrastructure... power plants and vehicles that we're not going to take off the road...
You may remember that James Hansen's censor at NASA was a Bushie flack named George Deutsch:
Andrew Revkin: George Deutsch... public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from... National Public Radio to interview Dr. [James] Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy... [who] said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country.... Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good"...
And on Monday Mickey Kaus saddled up and rode to the defense of the Bushie practice of having flacks censor scientists--specifically, of George Deutsch's instructions to NASA scientists never to say Big Bang but always to say Big Bang theory instead.
Why? Because Kaus is whining about Paul Krugman: because Paul is condemning Deutsch, Kaus must defend him. Paul's 700-word New York Times columns fail to provide sufficiently detailed supporting evidence, Kaus says. As whinings goes, this one is terminally stupid and lame: nobody's 700-word columns can possibly contain sufficiently detailed supporting evidence.
I suspect that this is all my fault. Earlier, you see, Kaus had written:
Mickey Kaus: Was I part of a "grand coordinated" campaign [against Paul Krugman]? Not that I know of. Who coordinated me? Whom did I coordinate with? And here I thought I was just bitterly lashing out because Krugman called me a Rhinoceros!... [Nick] Confessore... says I'm "non-right wing." That became "right-wing" in DeLong's summary.... Do I now admit that Krugman's "batting average since he started at the New York Times has been above 90%"? I don't think so.... Because I don't think it, I doubt I've ever said it--and I doubt DeLong can cite somewhere where I've said it. That seems an oddly high hysterical b.s./word ratio for a tenured Berkeley professor. What are DeLong's economics like?...
My guess is that having written this Kaus thought he had to back this up with an attack on Paul Krugman--it had, after all, been years since Kaus had made a substantive whine about anything Krugman had written--and defending George Deutsch was part of the only attack Kaus could think up.
And I would ask Nick Confessore to rethink his classification of Kaus as "non right-wing": even among right-wingers, only the truly insane and the bought-and-paid-for get into bed with George Deutsch and his ideological ilk.
Background reading:
- Nick Confessore on the campaign against Paul Krugman: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0212.confessore.html
- Brad DeLong on the history of the Shrill: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/07/the_history_of_.html
- Brad DeLong picks up intellectual garbage: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/in_which_i_fall.html
- Ezra Klein on Mickey Kaus: http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/my_honordefende.html
