I was puzzled by #4, which implies that Slate is liberal. Really?

It's a property of the Washington Post, a neocon bastion. Nearly all writers at Slate who touch political topics are some variety of soft, medium, or eccentric neocon. They even have the world's only atheist neocon.

If you want liberal, see Salon, with the likes of Glen Greenwald and Gary Kamiya. No one like that would ever be allowed to write for Slate or the WaPo.

A more apt version of #4 would be: Slate should recruit some writers from the Standard, because it's not sufficiently neocon.

"It's a property of the Washington Post, a neocon bastion."

HAHAHA.

Washington Times is conservative.

Washington Post is and always has been very liberal.

The problem I have with the word 'liberal' is that there seems to be many uses of it circulating. I would have thought that people from the US would generally be 'liberal' because of all the hand-waving about freedom this and liberty that but often times I detect that the word 'liberal' is said with a sneer. I would have thought (before) that I was a liberal but I think maybe a better term would be libertine - not that Slate gives a damn about which way I lean.

Having said that it is hard to know what #4 meant when they called Slate liberal. True, it is owned by the Post but I don't think it follows Post guidelines. The Post is establishment conservative say. That is, it tows the bi-partisan party line by which I mean, on the big issues of US sovereignty and hegemony it differs little from US leadership and would rarely rarely contradict it. The Post is not a neocon bastion though, and Slate certainly isn't. Neocons: they're the folks who subscribe to the unchecked corporation doctrine and the US hegemony doctrine. Those would be right-wing economists like in academia, the Fed, the White House and appointed cronies, right-wing Republicans and right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.

Slate is nowhere near this territory, Fred Kaplan regularly rips the establishment a new one. The site carries a Bushism column and Daniel Gross is clearly not a corporatchik(?) and Hitchens really has a commie heart under beating under his saber-rattling ballyhoo (I predict a death bed recant.)

The Observer stopped being liberal (in the British sense) when it shied away from the Liberal Democrats and swooned into Tony's arms and disgraced itself irreparably in the run up to the Mess'O'Potamia by not as they say speaking Truth to Power when it was most needed.

Er, don't you think? I didn't get half the analogies.

The meaning of the label "liberal" in the USA has departed substantially from its original meaning, as still used in the UK. In America, liberal has come to be just a synonym for left. An American would say the British Labour Party was liberal. That sounds bizarre to an Englishman, like saying water is dry. But when the Englishman says Thatcher and Reagan are classic liberals (a true statement given the original meaning of the word) it sounds equally odd to Americans.

As for Slate and the meaning of neocon -- to me the term signifies:

-- A broadly pro-corporate, upper-half view of economic matters: supports free trade; forgot that trade unions even exist; little interest in corporate regulation (if not outright hostility); and considers that fuzzy-left notions like income equality are foolish and dull.

-- Believes in the projection of American power without answering to anyone outside US borders, except Israel. Believes that elites know best, and projection of US power does not require the approval or understanding of the little people.

Slate fits that pattern quite well, it seems to me, in stark contrast to Salon for example, never mind Alternet or Mother Jones. I characterized Slate as a range of soft to medium neocon, not the hardest variety you would see at the Weekly Standard or AEI. But neocon nevertheless. Daniel Gross is dismissive of Bush, but neocon does not require allegiance to Bush or even the Republicans. I would place Gross generally in the "freakonomics" genre, which popped up everywhere after the success of the book by that name. The general pattern is a detached analysis, pointing out how the laws of economics will have their way whether or not people, companies, or governments understand or agree. That is view falls easily within the neocon spectrum. (I like his columns and read them always.)

Kaplan is an example of the soft neocon. He forever says the war in Iraq is not working, but always pointing out at the end that there is no way out, we are stuck, and it must go on. The end of his most recent column is typical:

"And so, in this regard, Iraqis are not so different from Americans: They hate the war, they hate the occupation, but they don't know what to do about it; they don't know how to bring it to an end without very possibly sowing still greater destruction."

He doesn't question the true rationale for the war or who was behind it, or dwell on the lies and deceptions used to sell the war, or examine how the failure of the war is inevitably linked to the true rationale, lies, or deceptions. (See Kamiya, for example) To Kaplan, the war is like a hurricane, which blew in from wherever, and Bush blew the response. Neocons are smarter than Al Qaeda, who act as if any deviation from the party line must be punished. Neocons understand that some diversity is required, and that people like Kaplan provide the valuable service of "laundering" their mistakes, turning them from policy mistakes to unavoidable situations; and by forever criticizing the details, keeping the focus off the big picture. That pretty much defines the edge of the envelope that the WaPo or slate will publish.

proxywar, greetings!

Your post is thoughtful and lucid. I agree with you completely on your analysis of the fraught usage of the word liberal. I think it is therefore best avoided.

Your delineation of what it means to hold a neocon world view is spot on and echoes my post I think.

Putting Mr. Gross into the freakonomics camp is also well spotted, I wouldn't have noticed that. He is not even a soft neocon though, witness this headline: The subprime collapse didn't bother the Bush administration, until Wall Street bankers started whimpering. There are many other examples where he pretty much says that the guy on the street is getting shafted and that the blame lies with the corporate elites. This is not something one would hear in the Wall Street Journal (or the Washington Post for that matter I presume - disclaimer, I rarely read it.) I too, habitually read his columns, economics is addicting. By the way, I guess you know this, the socialist press has predicted the credit meltdown for something like three years and in the know investors are long long gone.

You might be right about Kaplan but my feeling is that if somebody is that critical of the methodology of the war they'll keep their brain turned on when it comes to the causes of the war. I could be wrong. I'll read him more carefully in future.

I've not heard of The Weekly Standard thankfully - must be a Yank thing, I urge you to keep it on that side of the Atlantic please.

Also Salon recently posted a Chris Floyd piece, that guy rocks. I'll check out Alternet and Mother Jones. Have a look at Counterpunch or Zmag if you haven't already.

I think the quality of writing on Slate is top class. I love Hitchens even though I regularly want to slap his face with a wet carp.

All the best...

though his columns seem to have more sense in them lately. Six months ago he was touting bubbles as being good for the economy. Since August nobody's talking that way. So Gross had enough intelligence to see some of the same problems that Paulson and Bernanke were denying and shift somewhat. But Gross is still late to the party; a couple years ago he was dismissive of gold at $450, and didn't see the impending train wreck. He's no prophet. But my biggest beef with Gross is that he's too micro: focusing on individual businesses rather than the economy. He doesn't see the forest for the trees. Occasionally he's spot on, but more often he goes off on a tangent. Now that the economic problems are undeniable, he's more targeted. It's also politically correct to bitch about the blatant criminality that exists between Wall Street and Washington--now that even big business is lining up behind Hillary. Bush at 24% means that more 'liberals' are coming out of the woodwork. But I'd prefer a writer who could look ahead a couple years.