I’ve seen the future of Liebling opimality, and it ain’t pretty.

A. J. Liebling (author of The Honest Rainmaker and many other classics) once boasted, “I can write faster than anyone who can write better and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” I’ve long admired this sentiment, as has political journalist Mickey Kaus, who has lived it by moving from magazine and book writing to blogging and, now, twittering.

I’m worried, though, now that Kaus’s blogging has become more twitter-like, that he’s approaching a logical extreme of Liebling optimality, which is to make his posts shorter and shorter and faster and faster until he’s reduced to sitting at his keyboard, posting single characters, one at a time, very rapidly:

e…r…y…4…2…n…u…and so forth.

Some spots on the efficient frontier are more comfortable than others, no?

P.S. On the other hand, I’m sure Kaus still has another book or two or three within him, if he decides to move back in the other direction along that curve.