Mickey Kaus Fisks "Cocooning" Adam the "Caterpillar" Nagourney

Like one of those poker monikers that are almost irresistable to endless repetition, the li'l lefty Cocoon-builder [or do they also have "bubbles" in Dowdyville?], Adam Nagourney has his diapers lowered and is soundly spanked by Mickey Kaus on Slate:

"Narrow Victory by G.O.P. Signals Fall Problems": Cocooning--nobody does it better! Adam "Caterpillar" Nagourney triumphantly returns to regain his title as the best at his profession--the profession of telling gullible Democrats that this time they really have the Republicans on the run! [Nagourney's piece seemed on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-handiish. What, exactly, did he miss?--ed

1) Nagourney talks about "Republican institutional advantages" but misses the key, substantive advantage Tuesday's election revealed, namely the power of the House GOP immigration "enforcement" position to mobilize core Republican voters.

2) Instead, Nagourney says the pro-enforcement vote "highlighted divisions within the [Republican] party" between get-tough House members and President Bush. But it's Republican House members who are in the ballot in November, and it's their Democratic opponents who are likely to adopt President Bush's pro-legalization position. If we're talking about Signaling Fall Problems, why doesn't the centrality of the immigration issue Signal Fall Problems for the Dems, as opposed to the GOPs?

3) Nagourney, says, of the victorious GOP candidate,

Mr. Bilbray's failure to break 50 percent was striking.

But, as the LAT's Brownstein and Hook have the honesty to note,

Bilbray ran behind Bush mostly because two conservative independent candidates siphoned off about 5% of the vote.

Nagourney's failure to mention the conservative appeal of the independent candidates is ... striking.

4) "This was never considered a truly contested district," declares Nagourney. Two paragraphs later he says it was on a list of "the 10 most competitive races for House seats now held by Republicans, as identified by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report." Huh? Sounds like it was considered contested by Cook! ...]

The arrant arrogant absolute dishonesty of the lefty project seeps and oozes from almost every editorial-soaked article the NYT, LAT, and WaPo project as "news." It's obvious that dishonesty is what the bulk of their readers WANT TO HEAR, and therefore, they pander to their readers' leftish prejudices. And at the same time, inform their readers, like Pravda and Izvestia used to do, of the latest party line in Political Rectitude.

Mickey Kaus continues to call them as he sees them, not as the lefty project wants them to be perceived.