"Yes, it’s true that Hillary Clinton got more votes, but he got the votes of more than 62 million people — and I am pretty sure I don’t know any of them."

"You can make a rude joke about Donald Trump in places like Washington and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and be confident that nothing you say will give offense."

Michael Kinsley begins an op-ed in the NYT with a joke, confident that it will not give offense.

It would be nice, I have long thought, to have an openly opinionated press as Britain does, with papers such as The Guardian in London.Instead of hiding their biases, writers and correspondents could say what they think, and readers could discount accordingly. Well, since Mr. Trump became a serious possibility for president, we have had that world I longed for, and I’m not so sure I want it. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other establishment outlets have been brazenly, laughably hostile to Mr. Trump, in their news pages as well as their opinion sections. Maybe this hostility is justified. In fact, I think it probably is....

Meanwhile, we were just out motoring across a good section of the heartland. We stopped by the side of the road to get a picture of the old family farm in Perrysville, Indiana, and I happened to turn around and notice this:

"Nobody is saying 'that news organizations should simply defer to the government when it comes to deciding what the public has a right to know about its secret activities'..."

"... which is how [NYT Public Editor Margaret] Sullivan mischaracterized [Michael] Kinsley’s argument [against Glenn Greewald]. Of course the press can, and should, fight for its rights. But we won’t always win; it would be arrogant to suggest that we always should. The rule of law applies to everybody, even reporters."

RELATED: Snowden did a TV interview last night.

"There are times that what is right is not the same thing as what is legal,” Snowden said. “Sometimes to do what’s right you have to break the law.”...

“Being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else,” Snowden told [Brian] Williams. “Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country and knowing when to protect the Constitution against the encroachment of adversaries. Adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries. They can be bad policies.”

Camille Paglia talks about Hillary Clinton in 1994.

I'm assuming this 1994, because she's promoting her book "Vamps and Tramps" which came out in 1994. I've excerpted this 2-minute bit about Hillary Clinton (but the whole show is excellent, and if you think you hate Bill Maher, you may change your mind):



The section of "Vamp and Tramps" she refers to is a transcript of a CNN "Crossfire" episode, where she's on with Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan, talking about the Whitewater scandal in 1994. I couldn't find video of it on line, but I've got the text, and Kinsley starts of the discussion by saying there's "extraordinary antagonism towards Hillary Clinton, far beyond anything that could be explained by Whitewater or health care or anything like that," and suggesting that it's really "old-fashioned resentment of a successful, powerful woman."

Paglia vehemently disagrees, saying she'd "loved Hillary during the campaign" and "is judging her not as a woman but as a person in public life."

I feel that she has no idea how to maintain herself in that high position. She just hides from accountability. I find her arrogant. I find her cold.

There's more and Paglia has to fight off the accusation of sexism (mostly for daring to judge the expression on Hillary's face). Ah, here's the transcript (minus 2 pages, Google Books style).

"Reformers tend to be difficult people. But they come in different flavors."

Writes Michael Kinsley, reviewing Glenn Greenwald's book ("No Place to Hide").

There are ascetics, like Henry James’s Miss Birdseye (from “The Bostonians”), “who knew less about her fellow creatures, if possible, after 50 years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements.”

There are narcissists like Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. These are self-canonized men who feel that, as saints, they are entitled to ignore the rules that constrain ordinary mortal...

Then there are political romantics, played in this evening’s performance by Edward Snowden, almost 31 years old, with the sweet, innocently conspiratorial worldview of a precocious teenager....

And Greenwald? In his mind, he is not a reformer but a ruthless revolutionary — Robespierre, or Trotsky. The ancien régime is corrupt through and through, and he is the man who will topple it....

"One subject that gets barely a mention in 'Double Down' — because it played virtually no role in the 2012 campaign — is race."

"In a book that aspires to be, and largely succeeds in being, the dispositive (or do I mean definitive?) account of the election, that may be the most remarkable fact of all," writes Michael Kinsley in a review of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book (which follows on their "Game Change," about the 2008 election).

Most of the review mocks their idiosyncratic writing style, which apparently inexplicably uses weird words — like "acuminate" and "coriaceous" — when normal words would do and distractingly substitutes nicknames — like "the Bay Stater" and "the Palmetto State" — when normal people would just say Romney, South Carolina, and so forth.

Michael Kinsley asks NYT executive editor Jill Abramson whether there's an ideological bias in the paper's news articles.

I know, you can't expect her to admit it. But the way she avoids admitting it is fascinating:

Um, I think that they would recognize a sort of cosmopolitan outlook that reflects that, even as we become international, we’re a New York–based news institution. 

"They" = a genuinely objectively reader. (Kinsley actually posited "someone from Mars," which is a silly image, since such an entity, even assuming he could read English, would lack the cultural reference points needed to understand what our various ideologies are and how they are expressed subtly in text written in a superficially neutral style.)

"Do you Tweet?"/"I tweet when I’m prodded to tweet."

"What about you, do you tweet?"/"Only when forced."/"Exactly. Now why is that?"

"What about Facebook?"/"No, I don’t use Facebook. I absolutely don’t want to stay in touch with everybody in my past. I really believe in falling out of touch with people."

"There’s something about the way a magazine looks and feels when it doesn’t have advertising that is unbelievably disappointing..."

"... both as an editor and as a writer. Pages are not meant to be adjacent to one another. They need the advertising to give it body and fullness. There was always that sense of Newsweek being not the full-bodied thing that it ought to be."

Said Tina Brown, in whose hands Newsweek died, prompting Michael Kinsley to say, "It seemed wan." And then Tina says, "Yes, it always seemed wan, and that affects the way you read it. That was one of the big problems."

Makes Newsweek sound like a person... like an unsatisfying husband to whom poor Tina found herself married.

Much more at the link, by the way, including Kinsley's question whether it was really true that Newsweek was losing $42 million a year, and Tina's answer: "I’m not supposed to reveal the exact numbers. But I will tell you it cost $42 million just to print Newsweek.... Before you’ve even engaged one writer, or one copy editor, or one picture editor. Forty-two million dollars." And: "[A]ll the boundaries of print just feel so incredibly old-fashioned now—the need to do things in a certain shape, in a certain mix, by a certain time of the day in the week. All of that just seems so incredibly burdensome now." And:

In ten years, will we still have newspapers on paper?

“No” is the short answer, unless printed at home via the web.

"Rich professors doth protest too much."

Says Michael Kinsley. And I might want to read that article, but I'm too annoyed by the use of the verb "dost" with a third-person plural subject. I know it's a Shakespearean reference, but in an effort to go literary, he goes illiterate. He goeth illiterate. See? Doth is does, with a lisp. It's not plural.

ADDED: This post wrongly assumes Kinsley writes his own headlines over at Politico. Some unknown headline writer attempting to be literary, went illiterate.

Long ago Michael Kinsley found the most boring headline ever: "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative."

And now he may have found the most boring article:

The story that grabbed my inattention was in the New York Times on Monday, July 26. It was about a man who used to take long walks around the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, until he died last week. That’s it. That’s the story. In Silver Lake, he was wittily known as "the Walking Man." (You see, it’s because he walked all the time).

Was he a homeless man who walked because he tragically had no place to go? No, he was a family doctor named Marc Abrams. Was he an eccentric recluse who lived in squalor and scared the neighborhood children? No, he lived in a house with a hot tub next to the reservoir with his wife, Cindy. Cindy worked with him in his practice. Did he walk every day, rain or shine? No, only “near-daily.” Did he reject all conversational overtures due to the intensity of his need to keep walking, walking, walking? No, a local restaurant owner used to “walk half a block with him” and “strike up a conversation.” People along his route knew him from “years of drive-by small talk.” So what inner demons possessed him and caused him to take long walks nearly every day? The Times reporter asked neighbors. “He walked, he told them, to keep fit.” Of all things.

Ha.

And newspaper articles are too damned long.

Says Michael Kinsley in an article in The Atlantic which he sure as hell better not expand into a book.

(Thanks to Freeman Hunt for linking to that in the comments section of the post about books that are inflated versions of articles that ran in The Atlantic.)

Kinsley says:

Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” There is nothing special about this article. November 8 is just the day I happened to need an example for this column. And there it was. The 1,456-word report begins:

 Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened. If someone saw you reading the paper and asked, “So what’s going on?,” you would not likely begin by saying that President Obama had won a hard-fought victory. You would say, “The House passed health-care reform last night.” And maybe, “It was a close vote.” And just possibly, “There was a kerfuffle about abortion.” You would not likely refer to “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system,” as if your friend was unaware that health-care reform was going on. Nor would you feel the need to inform your friend first thing that unnamed Democrats were bragging about what a big deal this is—an unsurprising development if ever there was one.

Oh! That should hurt. It's not just padded. It's padded with cheerleading for the Democrats. No wonder we feel such revulsion.

"Being first lady is sort of half job and half life but good experience in either case."

Writes Michael Kinsley, analyzing Hillary Clinton and her recent jab "We can't afford on-the-job training for our next president."

... Clinton was clearly referring to work experience. But there is also life experience. Being first lady is sort of half job and half life but good experience in either case.

She has to be careful about making a lot of this. Many people resent her using her position as first lady to take what they see as a shortcut to elective office. More profoundly, some people see her as having used her marriage as a shortcut to feminism.

Count me as one of those people!

But being the president's spouse has to be very helpful for a future president. It's like an eight-year "Take Your Daughter to Work Day." Laura Bush, as far as we know, has made no important policy decisions during her husband's presidency, but she has witnessed many and must have a better understanding of how the presidency works than all but half a dozen people in the world.

And does anyone think of her as qualified for the presidency? How about Nancy Reagan?

One of those half a dozen is Hillary Clinton, who saw it all -- well, she apparently missed one key moment -- and shared in all the big decisions. Every first lady is promoted as her husband's key adviser, closest confidant, blah, blah, blah, but in the case of the Clintons, it seems to be true. Pillow talk is good experience.

Oh, let's direct these questions at Hillary Clinton, can we? Do you mean to say that pillow talk is good experience?

Clinton mocks Obama's claims that four years growing up in Indonesia constitute useful world-affairs experience. But they do.

I'm interested in seeing if her mockery silences him. Will he shut up about this idea that he is what Kinsley calls "a world man." Or will he figure out how to say it better and not her allow her to squelch him. If he can't do that, his vaunted oratorical skills mean little.

Kinsley owns up to supporting Obama. Here's how he explains his reason:

When I hear him discussing issues, I hear intelligence and reflection and almost a joy in thinking it through.

Oh, good lord. You can say that about people you meet every day in academia, and there's no reason at all to trust those characters as President. I'm sorry, but I hear patronizing in Kinsley's words.

When bloggers are too intrablog.

I blog (and vlog) about blogging sometimes, but I also try to resist it. For example, in that famous outburst of mine on Bloggingheads recently, I didn't want to impose on viewers by putting a remark that offended me into context, because I didn't think it made sense to appropriate Bloggingheads time to explain an old fight among bloggers. I think viewers (and readers) must get annoyed at bloggers going on about blogging. And I know I'm doing it now. But I ran across this Bloggingheads segment where they go very intrablog for a whole segment and talk about something that they assume we get, but in fact, they are talking about something -- "Blogroll Amnesty Day" -- that I've never even heard of. I mean, I blog a lot, every day, so if there's something about blogging that I haven't heard of, I have to think it's obscure enough to require an explanation. And not only do they talk about it a lot, they are oblivious to the possibility that viewers don't know what they are talking about. Not to mention the problem of whether we'd care if we did know. Last week, I was on vacation, taking a bath in my hotel room and, like the web addict that I am, for something to listen to, instead of something normal like soothing music, I put on the newest Bloggingheads episode. So there I am, lolling in the hot water, listening to Bloggingheads creator Bob Wright and internet god Michael Kinsley and they start talking about me -- me and that time I raised my voice and got mad talking with Garance. And Bob is giving background on the story that includes the sort of thing I thought I'd be misappropriating Bloggingheads time to go into. And asking Michael Kinsley to care. And Kinsley acted like he sort of cared a little, though not enough to really want to rake over the details. Which seemed sensible to me. Anyway, I'm thinking about this because I'm actually going to record a Bloggingheads with Bob today where we'll go into what I called the "old blogosphere flamewar" when I was trying to work through my minute of excessive emotion with Garance. And then we'll also have to talk about my minute of excessive emotion with Garance.... And, good lord, what's this?! So we'll also have to talk about what Garance and Eric Alterman had to say in a new Bloggingheads about me and that time I got mad at Garance. Sigh. It's all sooooo intrablog. And vortex-y.

Bob Wright on why I thought I was "ambushed" on Bloggingheads.

Sorry, this isn't the post about the new Supreme Court case. I'll get to that later. Remember, I'm on vacation. But I've just got to post about the new Bloggingheads episode in which Bob Wright and Michael Kinsley talk about me.

Bob introduces the topic by saying that under "the new Bloggingheads business model," he's going to have to yell at Kinsley and threaten to hang up. It's "the precedent" and "a proven traffic-generation model." Kinsley says he's fine with that, "the sooner the better."

Referring to the precedent, set, of course, by me, Michael says:

I didn't completely understand it. I certainly sympathize with Ann, the woman who felt she'd been abused by the bloggers.

Bob says that's good and notes that I didn't get much sympathy from the Bloggingheads commenters. He goes on:

I'm sympathetic. You're sympathetic because you recently got trashed by liberal bloggers. I'm sympathetic because I am myself prone to fly off the handle.

Michael asks for an explanation of what exactly it was that upset me, and Bob tries to explain. You can go over and listen to the explanation, which I don't entirely agree with, because it lacks context. He makes it sound as though all I ever wrote about was that a woman posed in a way that accentuated her breasts!

Now, Bob says: "Ann, I think, thought it was a set up. She... and I'm slightly culpable for this in a way I could go into and now that I've said this, I guess I have to go into it." He explains that before a Bloggingheads episode, the diavloggers agree to a series of topics, and that Garance Franke-Ruta and I had not agreed to talk about that old controversy -- what Garance referred to as "the Jessica Valenti breast controversy." (I would have refused, by the way, and in the past, Bob has tried to get me to diavlog with someone on that subject, and I have declined.) Bob: "Ann thought this was an ambush. Okay?"

Michael guesses that it was within a larger topic of "people being rude on the internet." But that was not one of the agreed-upon topics either. Bob says he doesn't know what our topics were, but says he's "sure" the topic of "mean left-wing bloggers" was. Well, it wasn't!

Bob says, "so from Garance's point of view, there was a legitimate context." But, no, in fact, she introduced the whole topic.

Bob goes on: "Ann thought it was an ambush, and here's my culpability." He explains that when he was arranging the diavlog with Garance, she had said she'd like to diavlog with -- guess who? -- Jessica Valenti! Bob didn't think that would be a good idea, because he assumed the two of them would just agree about everything, and so he suggested me instead. He makes a point of saying that he didn't realize that Valenti was the subject of the old controversy, however. But he did see me as an "ideological opponent" of Valenti's, based on the way her name had come up in my diavlog with Glenn Reynolds.

Bob reveals that he'd given me all that background and says that he sees it as a basis for me to have assumed Garance and Valenti are "kind of allies." This "increased the plausibility that this is an ambush," he says.

Bob invites Kinsley to comment on it, and Kinsley says, "it makes for good video when people are really upset and threatening to leave" and tells a story about Christopher Hitchens storming off the set of "Crossfire."

I'm not planning to keep bugging you with the old Bloggingheads story (which is a continuation of the old Clinton-lunching-with-the-bloggers story), but Bob Wright and Michael Kinsley were talking about me.

"Bush makes me sick. If he uses the 'mixed messages' line one more time, I'm going to puke."

John Green, a "Good Morning America" producer, was suspended from his job for writing e-mail like that.

"It isn't simply an issue of expressing one's opinion," [said Jeffrey Schneider, vice president of ABC News.] "It's also the vituperative nature of those comments."...

"What did this guy do wrong?" asked Michael Kinsley, a columnist for Slate and The Washington Post who in a recent column argued that the concept of objectivity is so muddled as to be useless. "Was it having these views, or merely expressing them? Expecting journalists not to develop opinions, strong opinions even, goes against human nature and the particular nature of journalists."

"I guess there are limits — if a guy's e-mail showed him to be a Nazi, you might not want him as a network TV producer," he added. "But unless the views themselves are beyond the pale — and millions of Americans hold views like those this guy expressed — expressing those views shouldn't be beyond the pale either."

William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, said he was troubled by the blurring of the public and the private. "For me, I think people should be held accountable for what they put on the air or in print," he said. And there is no proof this expression of private views affected news coverage, he said.

The problem with email is that it feels so breezy and transitory. By contrast, things written on paper seem more substantial to the writer. But things written in email are writing too, and they are much easier to send around. You may think you're just having some fun and blowing off steam when you shoot out an office email, but you're clueless and incompetent if you don't picture it bursting out into the general public. (Green's email appeared on The Drudge Report.) Kinsley and Kristol are in denial about what office email is. You think every single person in your office loves you and wants to preserve a tight circle of confidence for your sake? What a bizarre delusion!

Kinsley frames the debate we should be having about Alito.

Michael Kinsley frames the Alito debate superbly. There's only one serious argument, he concludes: "Alito is simply too conservative."

The Republican counterargument will be fourfold: A) He is not very conservative; B) no one knows how conservative he is, and no one is going to find out, because discussing his views in any detail would involve "prejudging" future issues before the court; C) it doesn't matter whether he is conservative—even raising the question "politicizes" what ought to be a nonpartisan search for judicial excellence; and D) sure he's conservative. Very conservative. Who won the election?

It's quite admirable of Kinsley to state those arguments clearly and fairly. He even talks about something I was just saying people need to address: the fact that there are different kinds of conservatives. He identifies three kinds:

First, conservatism can mean a deep respect for precedent and a reluctance to reverse established doctrines....

Second, a conservative can mean someone who reads the Constitution narrowly and is reluctant to overrule the elected branches of government....

The third meaning of conservative as applied to judges is a conservative judicial activist: someone who uses the power of the courts to impose conservative policies, with or without the benefit of a guiding philosophy.

He concludes:

Judicial power is like government spending: People hate it in the abstract but love it in the particular. That makes an honest debate hard to have, and harder to win. Nevertheless, it would be nice to have one.

Well said.

"As a woman... I wanted to be liked - not attacked."

Responding to "[t]he kerfuffle over female columnists started when Susan Estrich launched a crazed and nasty smear campaign against Michael Kinsley," Maureen Dowd explains the travails of a female editorialist:

Guys don't appreciate being lectured by a woman. It taps into myths of carping Harpies and hounding Furies, and distaste for nagging by wives and mothers.

Hmmm... that's a thought I've had a few times in my twenty years as a female lawprof.

This job has not come easily to me. But I have no doubt there are plenty of brilliant women who would bring grace and guts to our nation's op-ed pages, just as, Lawrence Summers notwithstanding, there are plenty of brilliant women out there who are great at math and science. We just need to find and nurture them.

Nuture?! If we want women to go on the attack, we've got to nuture them? Well, actually, yes! It takes a lot nerve to put your harsh, straightforward words down on paper. You can feel entirely squelched and intimidated, yet still have those things inside you, and you could say them if somehow someone managed to give you the go-ahead. I know I've found myself able to write a lot of things down in this blog, but I've also gone many, many years holding my tongue. There may be a lot of men clamoring to speak first, easily finding a way to talk over the women who have just as much to say. It may take a little something more to unleash what women can say. Maureen Dowd doesn't explain how she was able to let loose. Someone saw she had it in her and gave her the forum, and from there she had to force herself to do it. But clearly, she could.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links here for the point I think women are more sensitive to harsh attacks. This post is really more about how women are more harshly punished if they go on the attack, which is what Maureen Dowd wrote about. It's not just that we (generally) feel worse when we are attacked, but that we are (generally) more likely to be perceived in a negative light if we do attack. Anyway, I have written before about wanting more civility and rationality in blogging, such as here, where I respond to a post by Kevin Drum, who wrote:

[D]oes this mean that women need to change if they want to enter the fray, or does it mean that the fray needs to change in order to attract more women? As usual, probably some of both. Unfortunately, the blogosphere, which ought to be an ideal training ground for finding new voices in nontraditional places, is far more vitriolic than any op-ed page in the country, even the Wall Street Journal's, and therefore probably turns off women far more than it attracts them.

My response was:

I don't think women or the blogosphere needs to change. Each blog is a place unto itself, where a writer establishes a tone and a voice. As long as you keep the comments function off, you control your own space. A thousand vitriolic male blogs don't prevent one woman from setting up her own blog and making whatever she likes of it.

Reynolds was noting how vicious people were being to Zephyr Teachout -- in the comments. Well, I definitely turned off my comments long ago and after a very short experience with them, because I was not going to tolerate people talking to me like that on my own blog. I want to decide whom to ignore and when to fight back.