Beating the Drum

It’s not just The Nation that we read so that you don’t have to. We also monitor Mother Jones. (Actually, I snuck an article into Mother Jones once. I wondered, when I got my $100 check, whether I should rush to cash it or frame it. I got to mention this once to a Mother Jones board member and major financial patron, and the shocked look on her face had me smiling all afternoon. Oh, and in case you’re wondering: I took option 1—I cashed the check post haste.)

Anyway, one of the writers in Mother Jones who is actually worth reading is Kevin Drum, because he does some good original reporting, and sometimes departs from leftist orthodoxy or at least offers some original thoughts. Yesterday on the Mother Jones blog, Drum beat his drum:

Over the past few weeks I’ve written five posts making the following points:

  1. The acting Oscars are not really all that white.
  2. Flint is not a public health holocaust.
  3. The 1994 crime bill didn’t create mass incarceration.
  4. Photo ID laws probably don’t have massive turnout effects.
  5. Social welfare spending has gone up a lot over the past three decades, and welfare reform had very little impact on either this or the deep poverty rate.

Good for him. Drum goes on from here to complain that liberals who talk only in fact-free cliches risk becoming Fox News, which is simply playing to the cheap seats.

More fun is chasing some of these posts just to watch liberal heads predictably exploding in the comments section. I’ll just share my favorite from the first item:

Oh, you’d be impressed if they had a better record of honoring Black actors, would you? How about Native American actors, Kevin? Do they not register on your diversity radar? No, of course they don’t because you’re a European male living on the land stolen from them.

Pass the popcorn. (By the way, to this commenter I’ll just mention that he’s free to give back his own land to native Americans.)

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