Big Babies
Kinsley, Michael
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Big Babies" Diaper Dandy Big Babies by Michael Kinsley William Morrow / 336 pages / $23 REVIEWED BY Florence King If our leading liberal pundits could travel back in time to comment on...
...They want their taxes cut, their benefits preserved, and the budget balanced, all at the same time, and if it doesn't happen they stamp their feet and bawl...
...until you never want to have another opinion again...
...There may be more, but I stopped counting once I got the picture...
...On the defeat of his man Dukakis: "I have enough respect for the political intelligence of the public [?] that I hope a majority may come to agree with me the next time around...
...What used to be one of the day's great pleasures—perusing the newspapers over morning coffee—becomes a nightmare...
...Public debate cannot be conducted on the assumption that public officials are overly sensitive...
...1i.•} The American Spectator • January 1996 67...
...The case he makes to prove that Dan Quayle was wrong about Murphy Brown recalls those "Crossfire" moments when we long to reach into the TV and grab him by the throat...
...They tarred themselves without leaving a single real mark on Vincent Foster...
...Like all collections, Big Babies is uneven, mingling the author's best efforts with second-rate, dashed-off material that reviewers normally ignore unless there is too much of it...
...It's always possible that, being inexperienced in the ways of the Beltway Big Leagues, he took them more to heart than he should have...
...First-class was weighted down with enough fat-cat Republicans to sink the Titanic and that's exactly what happened...
...If Michael Kinsley were a Dickens character his name would be Barnaby Sneerly...
...It was written before the reports of Foster's 'suicide note,' in which he did indeed blame 'WSJ editors' for his troubles...
...But the Journal and its editors can be blamed for trashy journalism...
...Rangel a 'gasbag,' not the other way around...
...There are two such columns here, smart-alecky riffs that seemed to have no apparent significance until the Washington Post reported that Kinsley is quitting "Crossfire" and joining Microsoft to edit a magazine that will exist only in cyberspace...
...One of his best-known columns, "Who Killed Vincent Foster...
...Liberals, he says, are motivated by "an instinct to oppose," "a fear of seeming boosterish," and a "knee-jerk iconoclasm," which can be set in motion by a mere word or phrase that "starts the facial nerves twitching into the formation of a cynical sneer...
...5. Now comes the tongue-in-cheek clincher, a perfect argumentum ad sneer: "No wonder we're running a $400 billion deficit when unmarried middle-aged women think they can just go off and have babies by themselves...
...In the second, "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Pundits," which appeared in the New Yorker in 1992, a kvetching Kinsley asks us to feel his pain: It's opine, opine, day in and day out...
...mordant on the opportunism of spinmeisters James Carville and Mary Matalin ("They are strip-mining their lives...
...It's ten seconds to showtime and you suddenly realize you have no idea where Somalia is...
...Herewith his first paragraph: I have no real evidence that deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster was driven to suicide by a series of viciously unfair and hypocritical editorials in the Wall Street Journal...
...Even if so, the Wall Street Journal deserves no blame for his death...
...On himself as the Ayn Rand of the left: "My own political views are more or less liberal...
...3. "The very decision to give Murphy Brown a fatherless baby was more a product of capitalist forces—the quest for ratings—than any leftover 1960's ideology...
...and hilarious on the ironclad New York Times rule that a correction must avoid repeating the original error ("It was Mr...
...Suddenly I realized that the two flippant columns I had overlooked were pregnant with planted cues...
...When all these compulsions come together in Kinsley, he goes into a tailspin...
...He has a point, but only an unabashed elitist can infuse such sentiments with Hamiltonian élan...
...Then, his J'accuse spent, he abruptly reverts to speak-no-evil prudence in his last paragraph: Did the Journal editorials have anything to do with Foster's suicide...
...TV punditry adds a whole extra layer of terror, mainly of being exposed as an ignoramus...
...His new book contains at least four instances of this classic projection mechanism...
...It seems to me they're the sort of views a reasonable, intelligent person would hold .. the mystery to me is not why journalists tend to be liberals but why so many other reasonable, intelligent people are not...
...Kinsley, a closet elitist, merely sounds like a snob, and a confused one at that...
...1. If people waited for perfect conditions before bringing kids into the world, 66 January 1996 • The American Spectator no one would ever have kids...
...But it would be easy enough to make the case, if one were willing to use against the Journal the same techniques of innuendo and demagogy that the Journal editors used against Foster and his colleagues in recent weeks...
...tents...
...They were for it," Kinsley reminds us...
...Therefore, we should rejoice that the pill, gay rights, no-fault divorce, and toleration of single motherhood "have offered paths to happiness for millions who would otherwise be trapped by the conventions that provide the plots of so many gloomy nineteenth-century novels...
...That said, he flies into a search-andseizure and trots out everything the "howling" WSJ editors ever wrote about the Rose Law Firm, breathlessly revealing what the WSJ "breathlessly revealed" about these fine Arkansans, reiterating every "heinous" and "unctuous" slur and innuendo, right up to that final, "tastelessly sneery" headline, "A Washington Death...
...Johnson was "on" every time...
...Michael Kinsley: Oh, spare me the shock and surprise...
...The title refers to American voters, whom he blames for democracy's current disconFLORENCE KING'S latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...There he will lodge, writing on unpaper, and astronomers gazing at the heavens will point to his constellation and say, "Look, it's the Little Sneer...
...Anthony Lewis: Thoughtful people everywhere are sensitive to the nuances of five thousand tons of steel crashing into five thousand tons of ice...
...One click of the mouse and he will soar, trailing a little puff of smoke, into cyberspace, to edit a magazine that is, yet isn't...
...He's going to live in Redmond, Washington, Bill Gates's neck of the woods—and formerly this reviewer's...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...What populism calls "the real people" are thick on the ground out there, but Kinsley won't be troubled by them...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Diaper Dandy Big Babies by Michael Kinsley William Morrow / 336 pages / $23 REVIEWED BY Florence King If our leading liberal pundits could travel back in time to comment on the Titanic .. . Richard Cohen would apologize for damage to the iceberg...
...Ellen Goodman: Have you noticed how white males keep saying, "She hit an iceberg...
...Therefore, "Murphy Brown has nothing to feel guilty about...
...In a footnote to this column Kinsley simultaneously acknowledges its flaws and crows that his paralepsis was right on the money: "This column is the ultimate flowering of my neurotic obsession with the Wall Street Journal editorial page...
...Clarence Page: A white iceberg destroyed a black ship the other night...
...is a classic paralepsis —the rhetorical device whereby one says something by announcing that he is not going to say it...
...The first, written in 1991 but for some unexplained reason never published, is called "Term Limits for Columnists...
...This Kinsley displays a Johnsonian wit, but not even Dr...
...These, he insists, are mere "symbolic issues" calculated to stir up an emotional populace—and an emotional Kinsley, who suddenly gives vent to a Learish howl: "Is there no one eloquent enough to make people weep with gratitude that we live in a country where people are free enough to burn the flag...
...In fact, I don't even really believe it...
...44 If Michael Kinsley were a Dickens character, his name would be Barnaby Sneerly...
...2. What Quayle called "indulgence and self-gratification," the Founding Fathers called the pursuit of happiness...
...Bennett who called Mr...
...Big Babies is a collection of Kinsley's columns from 1986 to early 1995...
...We still have a long way to go...
...I hold them under no form of compulsion except reason...
...4. The family values issue is "a convenient excuse for the failure of two Republican presidents to do much of anything about the cities and the underclass...
...He professes "annoyance at the fatuous populism that dominates American politics," defining populism as "the politicians are terrible but the people are wonderful...
...Elsewhere, however, he admits to several other political compulsions...
...He seems to be aware of his identifying trait, at least subconsciously, judging from his frequent use of "sneer" and its derivatives to describe other people...
...Masquerading as a jab at George Will for changing his mind and favoring term limits for politicians, it is clearly what the compassion gang calls a cry for help, though Kinsley couches it in one of his projections: "If an obscure congressman is likely to suffer from swollen self-importance after twelve years, a member of The McLaughlin Group' is unlikely to avoid the curse...
...Kinsley is astute on the "fatalistic insouciance" of Britons faced with national decline...
...He twitches on cue in columns about the 1988 Bush-Dukakis race, contemptuously dismissing the debates over flag burning and the pledge of allegiance as "the flag flap" and "the pledge nonsense...
...Martin's...
Vol. 29 • January 1996 • No. 1
