As we know, Adam Felber does not comment on pundits and their opinions. Adam Felber prefers to stay focussed on actual news while referring to himself in the third person as often as possible. It’s kind of a rule around here, as you know. You know this because I have mentioned it every single time I’ve completely violated the rule. Like today, for instance.

Punditry is hard. You’re expected to take things in through your ears and send a response out of your mouth almost immediately. Those who allow their brain to interfere too much and delay the process will lose out to those who can get the job done faster and louder. It’s even worse in the fast-paced world of blogging, where a wasted moment means that someone else will get all those yummy links for simultaneously reporting and opining. Thus, today’s pundit must employ a variety of mental aids and vehicles to speed the process - crutches, hobby horses, and intellectual pogo sticks (which allow one to bounce directly over a new issue and emerge on the other side, still screaming but unchanged by the tangled web of real issues and necessary analysis).

It ain’t rocket science. If it were, rockets would explode spectacularly on their launch pads, going nowhere, while joyous scientists high-fived each other over another successfully loud and brightly-colored mission.

Which brings us to Paul O’Neill and his oft-cited remark that President Bush, in cabinet meetings, was “like a blind man in a room full of deaf people.” Politics aside, it’s a terrific image. Unfortunately for our punditocracy, though, it’s an image - it requires one to take in the words and construct a mental picture of a man who cannot be understood and can’t even begin to comprehend or even perceive the conversation taking place all around him. No, there’s no time for a speed-pundit to take in something like that, especially if you’re trying to provide broadband commentary with a 56k brain.

Like Andrew Sullivan, for example. Mr. Sullivan displays the rare virtue of admitting that he lacks the time to understand it but has an opinion on it anyway:

“MY FEELING ENTIRELY: I spent a few seconds trying to figure out what exactly Paul O’Neill meant by saying that President Bush is like a blind man in a room of deaf people and then gave up. I mean, life is short, and all that. Leave it to Mike Kinsley to tease it out:”

Yes, life’s short, and if someone whose career is based on providing news analysis is required to spend more than a few seconds analyzing news, where would we be? Sure, it was one of the most significant pieces of political news last week, sure, but life’s short. Sullivan had other things to do, like reporting (without analysis) that someone else had just reported that ecstasy is no longer the drug of choice in England.

So what about Michael Kinsley, whose cogent deconstruction of O’Neill’s image so impressed Sullivan? Here’s how Kinsley “teased it out” (it’s good enough to quote a substantial chunk):

“It’s vivid, and it certainly sounds insulting enough. But what on Earth does it mean? According to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, it means Bush is “disengaged.” The Washington Post story began, “President Bush showed little interest in policy discussions in his first two years in the White House, leading Cabinet meetings ‘like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.’ …”

I’m sorry, but how is being uninterested in policy like being a blind man in a roomful of deaf people? Are blind people uninterested in policy? Or, more accurately, do blind people become less interested in policy when they find themselves in a room with deaf people? Does a blind man surrounded by deaf people talking policy issues think: “Oh, hell. These folks are going to go on and on and on about the problems of deaf people. Who needs that? I’ve got problems of my own.” Is that O’Neill’s point? And even if there is something about a room full of deaf people that makes a blind man disengage from policy issues, what does this have to do with President Bush and his Cabinet?”

Please note that the above paragraph is much more entertaining if read in the voice of Jerry Seinfeld doing standup. But even without that flourish, it’s a gem. Kinsley is thinking into his keyboard - his higher brain functions seem to be losing a race with his fingers, and the two are interfering with each other as we watch. I’d say it was a bit like the chariot race from “Ben Hur” but with no winner, but that would be an image and it’d slow us down too much.

Kinsley goes on to foolishly misappropriate Macbeth’s oft-misappropriated existential soliloquy and then finish up with a crass insult. Exeunt Kinsley and Sullivan, pursued by a deadline.

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Hacks exist on both sides of the political spectrum, of course, and I myself have been guilty of speaking first and asking questions later (or not at all). But what’s so remarkable about the above is that as criticism it is utterly content-free; it’s a response that can’t be countered because it isn’t even tangentially related to the thoughts it criticizes. It says, in effect, “I don’t know what O’Neill was saying, but it was stupid stuff from a stupid man.” Any reply to this would have to take us back to square one (”What O’Neill was saying was…”), and we are not a people whose mental transmission has an “R.” Nor would it help; the intellectual numbnutses these days delight in responding, “Well, if he has to explain what he meant, maybe he shouldn’t have said it at all,” and we find ourselves no closer to the issue, still strutting and fretting in the content-less void, which some call “The No Spin Zone.”