Dancing With Himself

In addition to confirming that Michael Kelly was the wrong person to invite to your wedding, William Powers of the National Journal also reveals, inadvertently, that the tiny dancer was a tiny fraud:

"[Kelly] drove people crazy. In his Washington Post columns, he settled into a style one might call the scorched-earth polemic, in which he made it clear that anyone who disagreed with him on the subject at hand was not just wrong, not just misguided, but deeply, irredeemably corrupt. Yet he had a mild, tolerant personality, and his own political views were more complicated and interesting than he ever let on in those columns. I know, from countless liquid conversations in the Madison Hotel bar, that his political pantheon included such names as Roosevelt and Moynihan and that some of his views had a decidedly old-liberal cast. But he mostly kept those ideas to himself, didn't take on those issues or use them to modulate his fierce public persona. Why? Because he didn't want to be just another media smoothie, one of those who clip and trim their arguments in order to remain in the club.

Amazing. Powers asserts that Kelly, who was in fact a prosperous member of the media "club" because of his mastery of the simplistic, vitrolic argument was really more intelligent than he let on. However, Kelly deliberately kept his complicated and interesting arguments out of print because he "didn't want to be just another media smoothie." In other words, Kelly "clipped and trimmed" his arguments in order to appear less complicated and more of a wing-nut than he really was. So he could appear to be outside of the club in which he was a prominent member.

Powers inadvertently confirms MWO's Kool Kids thesis, stating that Kelly "was in some of the media's best clubs." (Meaning, of course, the same ones Powers is in.) But Powers also asserts, schizophrenically, that Kelly wasn't "of" those clubs, and was an "outsider," even though those clubs "rewarded and even cherished him." You can't have it both ways.

In the end, Powers is saying his friend Kelly was a fraud and hypocrite who thought his readers were too stupid for a complex argument, and who maintained a right-wing persona just to stay in with the Kool Kids.

Well, if you say so, Bill.