Michael Kinsley, in response to the current TIME cover story, which claims that Obama is channeling Ronald Reagan, concludes in a recent LA Times op-ed that:

Reagan, with his sunny disposition amid catastrophe, taught Americans that it will all be OK; don’t worry about it. So for 30 years we didn’t worry about it. Now we’re worried. But it’s a little late. I don’t call that greatness, or worth emulating.

Claiming that Reagan was a “terrible president,” Kinsley gleefully states, “I know, I know, you’re not supposed to say this …” as if he’s somehow committing the ultimate sin in American politics and is simply tickled purple to be doing so. If Kinsley is merely titillated to be wee-weeing in the punchbowl, I can appreciate that — the adulation for both politicians and celebrities does get quite absurd and annoying in this country — but if he’s trying to make a convincing argument here that Reagan was a terrible president, he doesn’t succeed. In fact, one might question whether or not he’s even seriously trying to make a case.

Regarding Time’s claim that Obama is emulating Reagan, Kinsley asks, “Where is the evidence?” I’m asking the same of Kinsley’s claim that Reagan was terrible. For someone who induced America into not worrying for three full decades, Reagan possessed some paradoxically influential suckage.

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Tea Party Patriots, rejoice! With enemies like Michael Kinsley, who needs friends?

Read between the sneering lines of Kinsley’s May 18th column in The Atlantic and you may just find an unintended love-letter to the very Tea Party Patriots he so desperately would like to torpedo. In fact, Kinsley’s blindness to the movement’s power is a proxy for the entire Democratic party’s colossal blindness to the tsunami about to drown it out of office this November.

Kinsley’s sneer begins with the headline: “My Country, Tis of Me.” (Because no party ever acts in its own self-interest.)

The overarching purpose of Kinsley’s Tea Party obituary is the left’s standard 3M approach: moralize, marginalize, minimize. It’s done through a series of disinformation volleys. Here are Kinsley’s primary distortions.

The Tea Party Is Right-Wing.

Kinsley launches his first Scud: “The right-wing populist Tea Party movement has politicians of both parties spooked.” The most important word in this sentence is “right-wing.” The Winston Group’s three surveys conducted from December to February showed that while 57% of the Tea Party are Republicans, four in ten are Democrats and independents. The majority of the Tea Party is right-wing, but it is far from monolithic and hence representational of more than a fringe right segment of the country. (more…)

Michael Kinsley, the former editor of Slate, once defined a gaffe as what happens when a politician inadvertently blurts out the truth.  But what about when a card-carrying member of the MSM does the same thing?

David “advisor to presidents” Gergen is perhaps the most conventional of the conventional-wisdom purveyors in Washington.  To paraphrase Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman, every word that comes out of his mouth is a cliche, and that includes “the,” “but,” and “and.”  Almost nothing he says is ever original, insightful or thoughtful, although he delivers his empty phrases in a professorial honk that seems to convey authority.  If you want to know what everybody else within the Beltway is thinking, Dave is your go-to guy.

So that’s why this clip from last night’s debate between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley, competing in a special election next week for the open Massachusetts Senate seat, and moderated by Gergen, is fascinating.  Watch it first, then we’ll discuss:

It’s not the Kennedy’s seat, and it’s not the Democrats’ seat.  It’s the people’s seat.

If, against overwhelming odds, given Massachusetts’ political proclivities (number of Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation: zero), Brown can wrest the open Senate seat from Ted Kennedy’s cold, dead hands, he’s not only going to send a message to the nation that Obamacare is doomed, and probably the Democrats next fall as well.  He’s also sending a message to the Democrat-Media Complex. (more…)