Yes, Mickey Kaus is still an idiot.
Kaus nails Krugman for this quote in yesterday's column:
[Bush] waited until after the election to reveal that what he really wanted to do was privatize Social Security.Which, Kaus seems to think, is definitively and positively refuted by this excerpt from a (pre-election) NYT story on the campaign:
At a rally in Pennsylvania last week, Mr. Bush declared, as he does at almost every campaign stop nowadays, that "younger workers ought to be able to take some of their taxes and set up a personal savings account, an account that they can call their own, an account that the government cannot take away and an account that they can pass on from one generation to the next."Never mind that this story doesn't actually mention the word 'privatize'. The real stupidity here is that Kaus ignores the absurd lengths the Republican party went to in order to keep reporters from using the word 'privatize' (more here, in Kaus's own magazine).
Nor did Kaus bother to check if Bush himself ever used the word 'privatize' in the context of Social Security. (Answer: not in anything recorded at whitehouse.gov.)
What Krugman is talking about is this deception, the deliberate omission and attempted suppression of the word 'privatize'. Kaus, in other words, plays gotcha with Krugman by completely ignoring the exact thing Krugman is talking about.
But then, that's what makes him Mickey Kaus.
[That's all, folks]
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