My favorite highlight from Gawker’s incredibly thorough (and kind of creepy) oppo dump on Mickey Kaus’s senate campaign:
Kaus never married, and rents an apartment in Venice. “He’s chased girls like crazy—that’s for sure,” says Gregg Easterbrook, his former colleague at the Washington Monthly. “Mickey is actually very popular with women,” says Alter. “It’s a bit of a puzzlement. In L.A., there’s a posse of young, attractive women who laugh at Mickey’s jokes and like him. He attracts younger women. He meets them at parties, and it’s ‘come on upstairs and let’s review my op-ed pieces.'” We couldn’t pry the identities of any of these pretty young things out of any of Kaus’ acquaintances, but we have an idea how he seduces them: Mix tapes! Kaus is given to ostentatiously shoehorn the names of indie rock heroes like Built to Spill and the Arcade Fire into his posts on immigration reform and the like, just to let us know he’s hip. Easterbrook cites his “excruciatingly detailed knowledge of the indie nightclub scene,” and Alter says he frequently makes mix tapes of the latest cool tunes for his friends. Add to that this 2004 registration, under Kaus’ full name Robert Michael Kaus, for a song rather wistfully entitled “That Never Happened With You” in the U.S. Copyright Office’s public catalog, and a picture of hipster lothario trapped in the body of a hairy, bald blogger pushing 60 quickly emerges.
Am I the only person to find this kind of awesome?
Whenever I read something like this, I wonder what they’d find about me.
I like to think that they wouldn’t find anything… but, then, I think “what if they go back and talk to Jenna?”
They’d have a goldmine if she were willing to focus on this part of our relationship to the exclusion of that part.
This makes me weirded out by oppo projects… though one could do a *LOT* worse than Mickey ended up doing.Report
Anyone half-competent would just have me dead-to-rights.Report
The truly awe-inspiring part was that as senior class president he booked The Velvet Underground to play at his high school. Think about that. Perhaps such a master of the impossible can unseat Mme. Boxer?Report
@Matthew Schmitz, Seriously.Report
It comes down to the fact that Kaus has been a dishonest a-hole for a few decades now, and this stunt is just more dishonest Kaus-trarianism. The day that somebody treats him worse than he deserves is the day I’ll have sympathy for him.
What really puzzles me, in terms of deep, dark background secrets, is why people pay him. Who does he have pictures of, doing what?Report