You have to take your hat off to Kaus. If 90% of what I printed under my own name every day were such unbelieveable drivel, if my predictions were proven wrong time and time again, if the majority of people who posted on my discussion board simply stopped by to call me a dumbass...well, I'd prbably give up and go find other work more suited to my abilities. But not Mickey. Nope, he just keeps on trucking kinda like Bush and Clinton. Doesn't matter if he's right or wrong, doesn't matter if he's an idiot.

But you're READING him. And you're writing about him.

People here have called for his head for years now. But if you read him, Slate gets hits (and threads); advertisers are shown that eyeballs are coming to the magazine. Money is made.

Dull articles don't make any money.

The way this works is, you hve a more or less liberal site; say, liberal/moderate. Then you publish lots of "counterintuitive" stuff, like Saletan writing about how that Bell Curve book might just be right after all and who are we to stand in the way of "Science," and bingo, business is done. Then you bring in some tool named Schmuel to write teh AIPAC version of current events in the West Bank and once again bingo, lots of hits.

Essentially what we're witnessing (and feeding) is the Triangulation School of online journalism. Find an orthodoxy, fatten it up and then "harvest" it, one piece at a time. Kaus isn't the best at this, he's just the most blatant, in that he has no other act.