Cliff, Michael — All fair points. Here was my take on Kinsley’s standard approach in the pages of NR a while back:

For example, Michael Kinsley’s career as a writer is dedicated almost entirely to a single intellectual trope: give conservatives their principles but denounce conservatives for not fully living up to them. Time and again, Kinsley has written some variation of “If they were really serious . . .” about abortion, tax cuts, the Bible, free speech, whatever, then “conservatives would” favor one outlandish position or another. He has argued, for example, that if conservatives were really serious, we would get rid of Social Security. Ridiculing President Bush’s claims to “moral seriousness” on the issue of stem cells, Kinsley objected to Bush’s statement, “We should not as a society grow life to destroy it. It’s morally wrong in my opinion.” To which Kinsley responded, “Taken literally, this would cover raising cattle or even growing wheat.” Okay, and tee-hee; but what is Kinsley’s “morally serious” policy on stem cells? He never says. He declares Republicans “self-righteous” idiots and hypocrites on the issue of parents’ rights because they didn’t support Elian Gonzalez’s return to Cuba . . . but, he concedes, they may be right on the issue anyway.
In Kinsley’s world, conservatives can never be pragmatists and idealists at the same time without being rank hypocrites; by this rationale, Abraham Lincoln was a fool and a hypocrite for not being a rabid abolitionist. Kinsley’s schtick is a good one and he is good at it. But it’s a fairly sad commentary that the man New Republic editor Peter Beinart calls the “dean of smart liberalism” has no higher aspiration than to quibble about the way the opposition sells its products, while at the same time largely conceding that ours is the superior product line.
But Kinsley’s biggest crime — and he has many accomplices — is that he makes a dumb and dangerous point seem smart and reasonable. As Meg Greenfield lamented a long time ago, “If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.”