Garret Vreeland points to this Los Angeles Magazine portrait of Mickey Kaus. Garret focuses largely on one aspect of the piece, which portrays Kaus as loving the fact, now he’s transformed himself into a ‘blogger’ for Slate, that he can go back and correct a mistake before most of his readers have ever noticed that he made it. I agree with Garret’s position on this one, that our credibility depends on the open acknowledgement of our fallibility. While I’ll go back and correct a spelling error or some awkward phraseology in a post after I read it later, or add to it, if I want to correct an error of fact or a clumsy opinion I owe it to my readers to say that is what I’m doing.

This issue was really only a miniscule part of the article on Kaus, though. The writer focuses with the most awe on Kaus’ ‘liberal iconoclasm’, and this is what troubles me more than his creation of an armor of infallibility. Robert Scheer, who loves to snipe at Kaus, is quoted as saying,

“The problem with Kaus is, I don’t know what real-life experience he’s got. He’s someone wet behind the ears, who doesn’t get into the streets too often to see how things play out. I think neoliberals have ruined the Democratic party. What is neoliberalism but the urge to ape neoconservatism? Why not join the other side?”

and Kaus himself admits it is more fun to lambast the Democrats than the Republicans. He justifies this by saying that the Republicans are beyond reforming, so he is going after the party — “trying to perfect it”, as he puts it in his hauteur — that has a chance of “accomplishing what you want.” He does it so well that his progressivism isn’t often much in evidence in his column. “I want to say something nobody else is saying yet is also true,” he says, creating the impression that he’ll thus be a contrarian for controversy’s sake alone. The infallibility issue that Garret raises thus begins to look like the tip of the iceberg when considering whether you can trust Kaus.