Kaul is a Liberal Twit!
Well, he was a liberal twit...
Back before "The Newspaper That Iowa Depends On" became "The Newspaper That Iowa No Longer Subscribes To," my folks were Register junkies and they sort of liked Donald Kaul, so I started reading his columns as they often had some sort of goofy regional interest. He increasingly became blatantly partisan, and struck us more and more as being (as my dad would plainly put it), "full of s**t." Around the period when Kaul had a hair up his backside about a state rep named Harold Knight, something must've snapped.
(Knight had referred to Des Moines as a "jungle." He was prescient. Kaul, however, wasn't going to let some rube from up around Humboldt call the crime capital of Iowa bad names.)
I would suggest that those were the days when he was still a liberal twit. By the time he got all "brigaty" and far too fine a social critic for the ignorant hayseeds who had kept him from going back to Hamtramck with his kielbasa in his hand, he was a full-blown leftist hack who managed to alienate the Register. Considering that the Register of that era was being steered by Michael Gartner (later of fake exploding GM pickup fame) and the egregiously bleeding-hearted Geneva Overholser, this was no mean feat.
I thought Kaul had either died or entered a monastery until a few years back when a minor rag reprinted a column of his wherein he came across as a combination of angry "look-at-me" progressive and scolding prissy aunt. His limited entertainment ability had obviously failed him completely. Now this shows up, spotlighting him as one of those literary (Polish) "sausages sputtering in his own grease." I'm a bit surprised he didn't have another heart attack before he put down the crayons this time around.