Remembering Kevin Drum, and a better era of arguing on the internet - McArdle WaPo [View all]

Why don’t we have a word for someone you’ve barely met, but nonetheless think of as a friend? The internet created the need for such a word, but as far as I’m aware, has yet to meet it. I realized this the other day when Kevin Drum — the liberal blogger formerly known as Calpundit — died.

I met Kevin just once, on a long-ago trip to Los Angeles, where I found him to be that rarest of birds: the person who is basically the same off the internet as on it. Both in person and online, he was possessed of a mild manner overlaying a keen intellect, fierce independence and ruthless honesty. He was as impatient with the nonsense of his own side as he was with the excesses of his opponents, and did not hesitate to point any of that out, even when it was costly to do so.

But mostly I knew him through our arguments, because we didn’t agree on much. Kevin was a joy to argue with: He always fought fair and smart. His weapons were charts and logic, not ad hominem and snappy retorts. When I read of his passing, after a long battle with multiple myeloma, I felt as if I’d lost an old buddy.

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Yet occasionally we became allies, because his intellectual integrity prevented him from going along with his own team’s weak arguments, or staying politely silent while it launched into wild error. The first time I can remember this happening was in 2004, when “60 Minutes” ran a piece on some documents that purported to prove President George W. Bush had gone AWOL during his Vietnam-era Texas Air National Guard service, but that strongly appeared to have been forged, a fact that CBS missed due to inadequate vetting. Kevin was forthright in listing the reasons to believe CBS had been hoaxed, while others on the left were equivocating, or making far-fetched arguments about how a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard could have produced, on 1970s typewriters, a document that looked very like what you’d get if you just opened Microsoft Word and started typing. Years later, when people tried to revive the allegations, he patiently laid out all the reasons to believe the documents were fakes.

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Apparently, over his years at Mother Jones, Kevin had repeatedly been offered raises, and repeatedly asked that the money instead be used to pay the journalism fellows more, or improve their benefits. There are few people who would do that, and even fewer who could refrain from boasting about it. Men of such caliber are rare, and I’m afraid that pundits of his stripe are practically extinct.

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Kevin had one of the most vibrant and longest-lived comment sections on the internet, and reading through the comments on the final post to his blog, I was struck by how many people were grieving the loss, not just of Kevin, but of the fellowship he’d created. How much he did, for so many people, and how much we have all lost, now that he is gone.

https://wapo.st/429shKL

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