I haven't been reading Ezra Klein much since he split off of Pandagon, but this is really good: End of the Powerline.
For those of you who don't know, Powerline is the blog that most forcefully pushed the story that memos used by Dan Rather at CBS in a story about President Bush's spotty record in the TX Air Guard were fakes. This turned out to be true, although a little-reported sub-plot is that the actual content of the "forged" memos was never disputed. Now, Powerline didn't make the discovery -- that was some freeper with a preternatural eye for typography -- but they were the most strident and persistent advocates for the "memogate" story, over which Rather subsequentally retired. For this, Time magazine named them "Blog of the Year."
It turns out (surprise surprise) that they're total wankers. Quoth ezra:
It's not just that they have no shame, it's that they once met shame on a street, beat the shit out of him, rolled him up in a carpet, and threw him off a bridge....
They get nothing right. Their fact-checking skills are atrocious. They neither report nor call experts, it's just whatever they invented twenty seconds ago. Watching them work is like attending a high school debate match in the impromptu event. Arguments are created on the fly, accuracy is unimportant so long as the product accuses the "MSM" or Democrats of some cardinal sin that'll leave Powerline's sycophantic readers moaning with the exquisite pleasure that comes only from having one's biases expertly stroked.
They really do have that kind of right-wing brainwashed thing going on, as you can see in this video clip from Chuck Olsen's Blogumentary.
As far as I can tell the left doesn't care about terrorism, doesn't care about islamofacism, doesn't care about 100s of thousands of people getting killed. All they care about is their own power... the whole mainstream of the Democratic party, I would say, is engaged in an effort that is really a betrayal of America.
Blog of the year, folks. Blog of the year. Really I think it says something more about Time magazine than anything else. It reminds me of that scene in Don't Look Back where Dylan is giving an interview to someone from Time. Paraphrase: "You'll never understand me or what I'm about," Dylan says. "Why, Bob? Why?" the reporter asks back. "Because you work for Time Magazine, man." It's a revealing moment, and one that continues to resonate with me.
I still believe there's an odds on chance that the internet will prove an even better ally to Truth and Reality than to Opinion and Rhetoric. In the long run wikipedia is vastly more significant than faux "free press" outlets like worldnetdaily. It's just going to take a little time.
