Gawker's opposition research on Mickey KAUS (running against Senator BOXER)

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http://gawker.com/5516387/the-mickey-kaus-oppo-research-project

The Mickey Kaus Oppo Research Project

Poor blogger Mickey Kaus is running for Senate, and no one really cares. But we do, so we launched a little project to gather dirt on him. The best we got is that he brings heroin-addicted sex perverts into schools.

Kaus, who has made a career out of attacking liberals while claiming to be one, is challenging Barbara Boxer in California's Democratic primary because he hates unions and illegal immigrants. He's filed all the necessary paperwork and got himself a fancy (and crappy-looking, compared to his blog) web site, but so far the effort seems to be a bust: The party has denied him a speaking slot at the California Democratic convention, a decision that was based largely on his own repeated public statements that his candidacy is hopeless. And there's no way he's going to land a chance to debate Boxer.

A few weeks ago, with the aid of the inestimable Gawker intern Sergio Hernandez, we started looking into Kaus' past for the sort of damaging information that could derail his campaign if anybody were paying enough attention to actually attempt to derail it. Turns out he's a horrible nerd who graduated first in his class and got a perfect score on his SATs, so there's not much there. But some of his friends hate him and said underminer-ish things, and we got some really embarrassing photos from his high school yearbook, so let's get started, shall we?

1. Mickey Kaus is Not a Democrat
Kaus is registered to vote in California as a Democrat, but his schtick for decades has been to attack the mainstream of the party as a sort of intellectual concern troll on labor, immigration, and how gay John Kerry is (very gay!). That stuff is blogger gold, but the "fuck your friends" attitude, as Kaus' pal and former colleague at Newsweek Jonathan Alter puts it, can be a political liability when you're running as a Democrat. Here's a compendium of Kaus on bloggingheads.tv, the wonky debate site he started with Robert Wright, predicting that "John McCain is going to be elected president with 70% of the vote" and pledging to vote for him because he "put Obama in his place," defending George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program because "the Constitution is obsolete," and referring in a candid moment to "those of us on the right." Bonus Kausfiles prognosticative incompetence: He also dismissed the credit crisis that preceded the financial collapse as "a blip"—"this doesn't seem like a crisis to me"—which should endear him to California's recession-ravaged Democratic electorate and make for a good attack ad, if anyone were bothering to make attack ads against him.

2. Mickey Kaus Hates Gay People
Andrew Sullivan has been over this territory before: In 2005, Kaus claimed that heterosexuals would be genetically predisposed to dislike Brokeback Mountain—because, really, who wants to look at gays kissing and stuff?—and repeatedly argued that the movie, which was the 4th-ranked R-rated movie of 2005 and pulled in $178 million worldwide, would be a commercial failure in "real America" on account of the gayness. Add to that this 1985 New Republic piece lamenting the West Hollywood PC Nazis who forced his favorite bar into taking down a sign reading "Fagots Stay Out," and a pattern emerges: ... ....

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