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I’d Prefer A Columnist Who Would #SaySomethingInteresting

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Various publications have decided to give late-period Michael Kinsley a shot, and it never ends well. The Times is the latest to step up, and the result has to be the most late-period-Kinsley thing ever:

Surely, if there is a “party line” among the establishment media in the United States, it is anti-Trump, not pro. That doesn’t make it wrong. In fact, it’s largely right. But the venom, the obsession, the knife-twisting are hard to understand.

Let’s stop here. This is the most telling part, the idea that the “venom” directed at Donald Trump is “hard to understand.” Donald Trump is a man extraordinarily unfit to hold the most powerful office in the world. As Paul says, Trump is not stupid in the “less intelligent than you’d prefer the President of the United States to be” sense like George W. Bush, but stupid and ignorant by any standard. He thinks Americans are the most taxed people in the world. He thinks people could cover their lifetime healthcare costs with $15 a month. We could go on like this forever. Oh, and he’s openly corrupt, and he’s obstructing justice to stop an investigation into the integrity of the 2016 elections while planning some extensive vote suppression of his own. And in addition to being catastrophically unfit for office, he’s enabling Paul Ryan’s war on the poor on behalf of the 1% (and vice versa.)

Somehow, I’m guessing that if Kinsley was one of the 24 million people whose health insurance Trump was trying to take away, rather than one of the people who stands to get a big tax cut if TrumpCare passes, he’d understand why people are angry about Trump. (For that matter, if the typical elite editor or producer was one of the 24 million, I’m pretty confident Hillary Clinton’s email server would not have been the dominant story of the campaign.)

Anyway, you’ve probably heard of this gimmick by now:

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, (this guy is a professional writer! –ed.) though, and even Donald Trump can’t be wrong all the time.

With that in mind, we’re looking for a few positive words about the president, and we’re asking for your help. This is not about Trump the family man. It’s not another forum for debating the issues. It is a place to point out positive things Mr. Trump has said or done from the viewpoint of The New York Times and its readers. (And don’t tell me Times readers are too diverse to classify. You know who you are.)

[…]

As with so much new technology, Twitter works its magic by cutting out the middleman. But the benefit in this case is not just economic. Thanks to @realDonaldtrump, the average citizen now has a view straight into the president’s id. You may not like what you see, but you can see it.
President Barack Obama tweeted, or had someone tweet on his behalf. But he never embraced the idea as Mr. Trump has.
So that’s one good thing he has done for the country. Can you think of another? Please let me know at [email protected]. We’ll be revisiting this theme regularly in Sunday Review.

In a way, I almost have to admire this. Your typical washed-up pundit has to try to milk 800 words out of one shitty idea or lame joke that isn’t even worth a tweet. Kinsley is able to milk column after column out of one — shitty idea? lame joke? When it comes to Reagan-era ironists who can’t even pretend to give a damn about anything that doesn’t personally affect them, the distinction is impossible. And the kicker — they’ll mostly be written by other people, but he’ll get paid for them!

Kinsley has truly hacked the racket of pundits given a sinecure by an editor desperate to avoid giving space to someone who might bring — I dunno, expertise, research, telling readers something interesting they don’t know, something like that there. Maureen Dowd should just hop into an eighteen-wheeler full of remaindered copies of Are Men Necessary? and go home.

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