Crooks and Liars and Elves and Unicorns
391 words.
The occasion of Saddam’s largely meaningless demise gives us at least one colorful example of extreme partisan blogging from the left: The Farce Goes On.
In a nutshell, Crooks and Liars writer Barbara O’Brien took this opportunity to go on the attack against wingnut bloggers for “celebrating” Saddam’s death. The chief target, naturally, was wingnut point-woman Michelle Malkin. Now I’m no fan of Malkin, but her breathless post giving up-to-the-second live blogging details and reactions about Saddam’s execution is hardly the “celebration” Barbara makes it out to be.
But I can excuse that part. After all, popular bloggers need to sustain fights with other popular bloggers in order to keep their readers’ attention and keep the ad revenue flowing. I can even agree with Barbara completely when she writes of Saddam, “he’d been stripped of his power and has been pretty much irrelevant for some time, and … it’s unlikely his death will change a damn thing.”
But then she veers abruptly into the world of elves and unicorns with the paragraph that begins, “The very inauthenticity of the whole farce amounts to Bush Administration fingerprints.”
Yes, that’s right, even though the November elections are far behind us and mudslinging at the Republicans serves no political purpose, Barbara wants us to believe that Saddam’s capture, trial, and execution was orchestrated soley at the personal whim of George W. Bush.
Barbara goes on to quote extensively from Riverbend, one of the more famous Iraqi bloggers who also happens to spoon-feed liberal bloggers with exactly what they want to hear about Iraq. (Which is generally that America is actively seeking to provoke a civil war in Iraq.)
Um, okay. Note to self: Move Crooks and Liars’ intellectual credibility down closer to zero.
P.S. On the way home yesterday, I was listening to what would have been the Mac Watson Show but instead was run by guest hosts The Lee Brothers. On the topic of the impending hanging of Saddam, some woman called in and said she just wished the families of the 9/11 victims could be there to see the hanging. The Lee Brothers, of course, expressed their support for that sentiment, without ever noting the woman’s error. Why the hell are these people allowed to vote?
Thomas Krehbiel writes The Krehbiel Strikes Back, a moderate commentary on news, media, politics, and culture.
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