Michael Kinsley is STOOPID!

It's hard to write about Michael Kinsley, the absolute monarch of the Los Angeles Times' editorial and op-ed pages. He's one of those Eastern Haavahhd brahmin types, law degree and all, credentialed to profess that well-known brand of comfortable limosine liberalism which stretches just a little too thin over a smug corporatism more resembling the manure coming from Cheney and company. He's been around the punditocracy long enough to have mastered their peculiar style of didactic prose which is just barely insightful enough to wriggle out of ideological traps - until now.

Now, he's finally blown his cover. He outed himself when he took the extreme apologist side of the DSM controversy, attempting to cover the US media's ass for ignoring a document that damn near brought down Tony Blair's government. Intentionally or not, he got caught doing the perfect Karl Rove PSYOP distraction thing.

In this particular little act of intellectual dishonesty, he argues that, sure, Bush was lying and cheating to start a war, but much of the Beltway punditocracy already knew that. Therefore, only silly political extremists would now find it necessary to raise a fuss and get the public all in a dither at this late date.

Hey, mass murder happens.

Kinsley delivers this odd payload in a much-reprinted L.A. Times op-ed. He opens with a number of paragraphs intended to bait the left and ridicule the blogosphere out of existence. After that holy obligation is out of the way, he proceeds to drop the following assault with a silly weapon:

Of course, you don't need a secret memo to know this. Just look at what was in the newspapers on July 23, 2002, and the day before. Left-wing Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer casually referred to the coming war as ''much planned for.'' The New York Times reported Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's response to a story that ''reported preliminary planning on ways the United States might attack Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein.'' Rumsfeld effectively confirmed the report by announcing an investigation of the leak.

Slick, huh? He's basically arguing that the memo is completely true, and that's the problem with it. Since a handful of elite writers had inklings that a prewar deception campaign was in full swing, the fact that a government lied a nation into an unnecessary war is irrelevant.

While I would never dream to accuse Kinsley of actually working with the Rove office, he certainly excels at the same brain games. He's lying by telling half the truth. It's an old propaganda trick, used by every charlatan who ever fixed history around a dumb policy. He's picking and choosing his facts.

Note how he leaves in the part about how certain peripheral elements of the print punditocracy frothed briefly and ineffectually about their government's illegal and unjustified determination to kill a bunch of Arabs for the hell of it. Note also how he leaves out the obvious fact that the United States is populated by ordinary people, not elite writers in large Eastern cities who make a handsome living interviewing one another. He conveniently omits any mention of the relentless Big Lie propaganda spewing 24/7 from broadcast media, which easily convinced the great majority of Americans that Iraq had done 9/11 and was now out to finish the job with yellow uranium from Niger and mobile biological weapons labs disguised as broken down old semi-trailers.

Mikey can't wriggle out of this one. He's trying to rationalize away his profession's shameful performance, but we're just not that stupid. We don't buy it. His people blew it, big time. Complicit? Timid? Bought off? Just STOOPID? All of the above, methinks.

Now, we have other, older reasons not to like Kinsley very much. When Abu Grahib was making most normal people puke up their breakfast, he distinguished himself by running not one but two very pro-torture op-eds by two of the most famous and influential proponents of same. Local peace activists conducted an aggressive letter and phone campaign, asking only that an anti-torture op-ed run as balance. What do you think came of all this? You're right. Nothing.

More recently, he's decided not to really have an editorial page in the traditional sense at all. He's dismissed several of the Times' legion of editorial writers, and formulated a secret plan to bring in more freelancers and even (actually an interesting idea) to allow some "wikitorials" to be thrashed out online. I say "secret" plan because it was revealed after it was left in a copy machine. Meanwhile, it's fun to imagine future Internet prose-wars between competing networks of lefties and righties having at one another trying to get their positions into the final wiki. The Times had better have one hell of a BIGGASS bandwidth.

You'll also find some people bemoaning all these new ideas as a dilution of the paper's "institutional vision." I don't agree. After all, it's been a generation since the L.A. Times had a vision of anything more relevant than celebrity real estate transactions. Today's paper is a sodden wad, based largely on the notion that more is more. You can't dilute bloat, you can only spread it around a little.

Fortunately for Kinsley, spreading stuff around seems to be his core competency. We can't wait for this guy to tire of the Provinces, buy his one-way ticket east, and maybe go off and invent a way to generate electricity with his ego. THAT would end the need for any further Middle Eastern oil wars, while returning L.A.'s sole newspaper of stature to the few people who still seek the truth.