This James Kirchick character who smears Taki in TNR has quite a rep in the blogosphere, best summed up by liberal blogger Matt Yglesias:

“Kirchick has a promising future in conservative journalism, having mastered the time-honored techniques of rising through the ranks without any demonstrated ability in fields other than arguing with straw men and making things up about his opponents.”

Kirchick is a real piece of work: here he is retracting his youthful distaste for the Gay Freedom Day Parade, and eagerly endorsing it now that it provides some opportunity to bash Russia and create an international incident. The neocons hate the Russians these days, don’t you know: they won’t cooperate with the targeting of Iran, and Putin is “anti-American,” i.e. on to the neocons’ game.

Naturally, Kirchick defends Bush’s get-out-of-jail-free card for Scooter, but the comments section of his blog post over at TNR’s “The Plank” have his number.

And, of course, Senor Kirchick hates Ron Paul, cluelessly writing:

“The burden lies on Paul (as well as those commentators who claim that he somehow represents a welcome breath of fresh air to the GOP) to identify specific aspects of our foreign policy that are wrongheaded. This is something Paul has not yet done.”

Poor Kirchick: do they keep him locked up in a closet, so to speak, over at TNR, and let him out only when they want to smear someone? He has only to go to Youtube, or even Antiwar.com, where he’ll find that Dr. Paul is very specific indeed when it comes to identifying the many destructive aspects of our utterly wrongheaded foreign policy.

For someone who claims to hate “racism,” it’s passing strange that Kirchick finds the virulently racist perambulations of his boss, Martin Peretz, tolerable—but, then again, we all know that anti-Arab racism isn’t really racism, at least not according to the neocons. Here he is gloating over the death of Rachel Corrie. What a guy!

With the characteristic thuggishness of the left-neocon, who combines a leftish fetish for confiscatory taxation with a neoconnish vindictiveness, Kirchick bitchily snaps: “The best argument for the Estate Tax—next to MTV’s ‘My Super Sweet 16’—is Taki.”

There is no good argument for the Estate Tax. However, if there was such an argument-by-example, it would be Marty Peretz’s ownership-control of The New Republic, which, up until recently, he owed to his wife’s money. In 1974, Peretz purchased TNR with $380,000 contributed by his wife, Anne Labouisse Farnsworth, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Company fortune.