I’ve been kind of conflicted about the current war between the political blogs and the Washington Post. I’ll not even link it. It’s everywhere. It’s around Deborah Howell saying that Jack Abramoff gave money to both parties. The bloggers went wild and filled the comments section with attacks. A similar thing happened with Kate O’beirn and her book, Women Who Make Things Worse, on Amazon.com. The Washington Post actually turned off the comments on Deborah’s page.
While a lot of the comments were too raunchy, the points were valid. Deborah Howell was taking the Republican spin as fact. Kate O’beirn was being really offensive in her book. My conflict comes from a long time ago when I was on the other side of such a thing. It was in the ‘pre-Internet’ days. I wrote a letter to the editor in response to a particularly offensive article quoting some things the NRA said. My letter wasn’t profane or mean, but I did make an analogy between the NRA and the Nazis in Germany – one in particular, a guy named Adolf.
Not only were there endless counter letters in the paper, I began to receive long letters at my home [not in the phone book] and at my work. I got a free subscription to NRA literature, the Phyllis Shafley Journal, some John Birch Society newsletter. It went on for over a year, with smatterings thereafter. Clearly, I had been listed somewhere and was targetted from all over the country for a letter in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
I’ve thought of it often in the last few years. I think of it as an early encounter with the Right Wing network that now disseminates the Republican Talking Points so effectively. All of that attention didn’t change what I thought, nor my letter writing habits. It was a bit frightening. Those people carry guns! If anything, it felt like they were proving my point.
So I’m conflicted about this current war. I don’t think ‘we’ look so hot ‘flaming’ like that and the endless blogging about it is taking some good minds away from things that matter, like Rove’s Speech. On the other hand, the subtle bias in the media in favor of the constant spin placed by the Administration about the news is a cancer that needs to be made public. Surely there’s a middle ground here, but we clearly haven’t found it.
Ranting is fun, but when it discredits us, it needs to be modulated. Our points are already discredited enough…
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