Actually, Kaus attacks him for hypocrisy that he hasn't yet proven while I'd just attack him for being a total moron. Sullivan says:
There's a word for this: racial profiling. It's wrong in itself but it's simply astounding that this racist action by the police also resulted in the deaths of several more people. Why isn't this a scandal? The only reason the cops - not "everyone," in the weasel words of the "high-ranking police source" - were looking for a white guy was allegedly because only white guys are serial killers or snipers. First off, this is no excuse for racism. ...
In my view, any kind of racial profiling is always wrong. And if the cops had not been making reverse racist assumptions in this case, there's a chance a few more people would be alive today.
As Kaus points out, the police may have been looking for white people based on eyewitness reports. Or, despite the press reports, they may not have been looking for white people at all. They repeatedly refused to give out an offical description or composite sketch, so who really knows?
But, more to the point -- there's a big difference between using criminal profilers to attempt to track down a specific criminal and pre-emptive racial profiling which gives greater scrutiny to people of a particular race in order to stop unspecified crimes from happening in the first place.
Maybe Sullivan does take such a position, but it's certainly not in the mainstream of PC liberals like myself.
So, Kaus gets half a point for noticing that Sullivan says something stupid, but that's just shooting fish in a barrel. Minus a point for trying to drum up attention by accusing Sullivan of hypocrisy without really making the case. I have no doubt that Sullivan is a hypocrite on this, as he is on just about every other issue, but Mickey gets, like, PAID, for this stuff.
Sullivan 0, Kaus: -.5
(brought to my attention by Charles Murtaugh).
Updates: Public Nuisance has more on Sullivan's nonsense du jour.
and Neal Pollack reminds us that he'd predicted the precise details of the sniper outcome a week ago.