Slate = Fail

My original plan was to quietly take Slate online magazine off of my Blog list 'o links. Slate has long been a guilty favorite of mine. Many of their regular contributors (Fred Kaplan, Jacob Weisberg, John Dickerson, and Daniel Gross) share their founder's (Michael Kinsley) unfortunate penchant for partisan hackery. The usual article from any one of them for the past 8 years has had the same basic same formula: Choose any problem currently getting press, presume that the current presidential administration is evil, stupid, always wrong, and all the all-powerful cause of all that's wrong in the world, from that premise prove the current presidential administration is wrong and that they caused the problem in question through their mendacity, stupidity, and persistent wrongness.

Slate makes no pretense of ideological balance. No Fox News-like claims of fairness or balance. The editors seem to get a special kick out of crafting inflammatory and misleading headlines to get you to click on stories that are only marginally about what's promised (advertizing $$$). The Fray (their message board, like ALL internet message boards) is an utter waste of electrons (they, of course devote a regular column to tracking it). Bruce Reed seems to have some sort of horrible learning disability that makes everything he writes come out as pointless, shallow, and ugly.

Yet there are several features and writers I generally enjoy. Dahlia Lithwick, Witold Rybczynski, Chris Hitchens, Emily Yoffe, The Explainer, The Green Lantern, and Anne Applebaum come to mind. I may agree or disagree, but they are at least often worth reading. Slate also introduced me to some I follow despite their moving on: TMQ and David Edelstein for instance.

But as presidential/congressional race polling data begins to trend toward inevitability, I am beginning to sense emanations of liberal entitlement and pomposity from Slate writers (similar to Rush Limbaugh is 1994), particularly the less talented ones listed in my first paragraph. Seemingly, as a result, the dumb articles are getting dumber. To my eye anyway, as the masturbatory back patting grows more frenetic within their partisan bubble, the idea that thought, evidence, or even the occasional clever turn of phrase might be necessary (or even desirable) in political writing has been jettisoned in an avalanche of pent up hubris, nastiness, and schadenfreude.

Anyway, finally came along the article that was so stupid, shallow, wishful, and mindless, that I had to remove the tacit Sarcastic Weasel endorsement that comes from being linked on my blog:

Libertarianism is Dead, by Jacob Weisberg

Not that Slate benefits from my 3 readers.

Not that I wanted to make a big deal about it.

Not that I even planned a post.

I really don’t have time to put together my own refutation... something about 3 journal papers and one month to write them.

But the article was really ridiculous. And I don't seem to be the only one to find it to be an especially regrettable example of diminishing standards.

But, since Brink Lindsey (Cato@Liberty) took the time, I’ll point you over to his post.
If you want the quick version:
-Economic meltdown causes and effects still unknown.
-Most likely though:
-Public policy failed to stop the problem
-Private actors failed to stop the problem
-Public policy exacerbated the problem
-Private actors exacerbated the problem
-Weisberg = idiot