Lying in Ponds

Yesterday I said things were strange, but then today brings a genuine crossover column from none other than Ann Coulter, only her second in over three years, if you disqualify her Mineta vendetta columns. Her earlier Schiavo column had been the usual partisan rant, but today Ms. Coulter praises a list of liberals:

There are a few glaring exceptions. On the anti-killing side, to one extent or another, are: former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis, former Gore lawyer David Boies, former O.J. lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, McGovern and Carter strategist Pat Caddell, liberal blogger Mickey Kaus, Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader and Rainbow Coalition leader Jesse Jackson, as well as several of my friends who are pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage but not Pro-Adulterous Husbands Who, After Taking Up With Another Woman, Suddenly Recall Their Wives’ Clearly Stated Wish to Die.

I may get e-mail from readers arguing that praise of these few Democrats is just tactical or whatever, and therefore Ms. Coulter should not be credited with authentic positive Democratic references, but you have to give the devil her due. She didn’t have to name them individually, and she could have followed up by slamming them for inconsistency or hypocrisy, but she didn’t. Praising individual members of the generally-detested opposite party for specific positions is the kind of thing that ideologically strident but not excessively partisan pundits do frequently. For a titan of partisanship such as Ann Coulter, it’s a rare and notable event.

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It’s been a strange year in the partisanship rankings so far. A group of Democratic-leaning pundits have clustered at the top of the list (except for Ann Coulter, of course) since I began doing this; I’ve argued that the reason is that liberal columnists are writing in a target-rich environment in this Republican-dominated government. But this year the effect seems more pronounced. Paul Krugman, Joe Conason, Robert Scheer and Molly Ivins have continued to crank out partisan screeds on a variety of issues, but many of the more partisan Republican pundits have spent more time writing about cultural issues without reference to politics. The Terri Schiavo issue illustrates the divide — the word “Schiavo” has appeared most frequently in the 2005 columns of Linda Chavez (29), Cal Thomas (28), Kathleen Parker (25) and Thomas Sowell (20), with Richard Cohen (18) the first left-leaning pundit. Most of the conservatives’ Schiavo columns have not mentioned politicians (Coulter is an exception, as usual), while most of the liberals’ columns have attacked Tom DeLay, Jeb Bush, etc. The rankings reflect the different approaches. Last year, partisan conservatives spent most of their time attacking John Kerry, but a new Democratic target has not emerged.

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In Brendan Miniter’s column this morning, he directs readers to “our premium e-mail newsletter Political Dairy”. Moo.

I enjoyed this column by Ken Fuson in the Des Moines Register (via Romensko):

The bloggers’ success has caused much fretting and gnashing of teeth in what’s referred to as the Mainstream Media. Editors figure that if the blogs ever figure out a way to reprint Jumbles, we’re all going to be toast.

They also are raising serious concerns about whether a person who could be sitting at home in his underwear, writing on his blog while watching “The Price is Right,” should be able to call himself a journalist.

And the answer is no. True journalists would be watching “Jeopardy!,” dreaming they will win as much as that little geek (term of endearment) Ken Jennings, which would allow them to quit their dead-end jobs and launch their own blogs.

But the great thing is, if you’re a blogger, you get your rants linked to by other bloggers who agree with you, or other bloggers who disagree with you. Before you know it, you’ve taken more “hits” than Cheech and Chong, and you will achieve your dream goal: Being invited to appear on a Mainstream Media news show to explain why the Mainstream Media no longer matter.

Eventually, everyone will have a blog, writing for an audience of one. Or two (You still there, Mom?).

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A couple of weeks ago I responded to a strange Maureen Dowd column, in which she wondered why people find her to be meaner than Thomas Friedman. There has been lots of reaction across the web since, much of it negative. Kay Hymowitz at City Journal declared Ms. Dowd to be the “Queen of Mean”. Catherine Seipp in The National Review criticized Ms. Dowd’s “girlish twittering”, and recommended a greater diversity of female columnists. Lakshmi Chaudhry at AlterNet said something similar from a perspective on the left. Glenn Reynolds linked to an entire website devoted to rebuttal of Ms. Dowd. On the other hand, Michael Kinsley, deeply enmeshed in the issue of female voices on editorial pages, called Maureen Dowd “the most influential columnist of our time”.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention Brendan Nyhan’s reaction to Kinsley’s column — he thinks Maureen Dowd is “the most destructive columnist of our time”.

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Peggy Noonan’s column yesterday on the Terri Schiavo controversy, “In Love With Death”, generated a great deal of strong reaction. Personally, I’m very conflicted on the Schiavo issue, but I have sympathy for what Ms. Noonan is trying to say. Some of the attacks by left-leaning bloggers on Ms. Noonan are nasty and personal, and some of the comments on those sites are simply vile. But Peggy Noonan goes way, way over the line when she invokes the almost-always-bogus slippery slope argument:

Once you “know” that–that human life is not so special after all–then everything is possible, and none of it is good. When a society comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber. You wind up on a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz. Today that road runs through Pinellas Park, Fla.

What possible legitimate comparison can be made between the complex, difficult Schiavo case and a massacre of high school students or the holocaust of millions of Jews? Trying to associate political opponents with hated groups such as Nazis or the Taliban is a cheap rhetorical device; Spinsanity often pointed out that these kind of attacks have come from both the left and the right.

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The Media Bloggers Association continues to grow and evolve; here’s an intriguing development:

NEW ROCHELLE, NY, and NASHVILLE, TN February 21, 2005 - The Media Bloggers Association launched today the Media Bloggers Association Education and Training Program with the announcement of a unique partnership between the MBA And two leading Washington policy institutes: The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Under the auspices of the MBA, the two organizations will sponsor training for 15 MBA members to attend a two-day CARR training “boot camp”. CARR stands for “Computer-Aided Research and Reporting” and is designed to give journalists and now “citizen journalists” tools to cut through the PR cant and spin to get to the real underlying news on public policy issues, using publicly available databases and statistical research techniques the academic world has used for decades.

Also, here are this month’s new members.

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Bob Somerby is at his best when he uses his investigative skills to expose errors in the press — last week I linked to his demonstration of a mistake by George Will. Mr. Somerby is far from a neutral observer — he spends most of his time trying to demonstrate that the press is being too hard on liberals or too soft on conservatives — but he also is independent enough to go the other way on occasion.

But Mr. Somerby’s logic sometimes runs off the rails when ranting about The Washington Post. A piece last week attempted to debunk the idea that the Post is liberal by criticizing one news article and opinion columns by William Raspberry and Sebastian Mallaby:

According to eighth-grade civics texts, journalists are supposed to suspect the motives of big power brokers. But Raspberry — the Posts idea of a fiery liberal — didn’t suspect Greenspan’s motives when he made his odd defense of Bush’s tax cuts back. Instead, the Razz took Greenspan at his word — just as he later did when Colin Powell made that crucial speech to the UN in March 2003. . .

Now I agree completely that the Post’s mix of voices places them very close to the center of the partisan and ideological spectrum, contrary to the assumptions of some conservative critics. But my conclusion is based on the analysis of thousands of editorials and columns, not on the anecdotal evidence of one or two hand-picked columns. I just don’t understand what possible relevance a couple of columns could have to the question. Is he arguing that a newpaper can only be called liberal if each and every news story and opinion column is unfailingly liberal? By that standard, it would be easy to prove that Charles Krauthammer is not a conservative, because he sometimes criticizes conservatives. What is his source for the statement that William Raspberry is “the Post’s idea of a fiery liberal”? The Washington Post has a centrist Op-Ed page because it has room for strident liberals like Harold Meyerson, strident conservatives like Charles Krauthammer, and lots of pundits like William Raspberry in between.

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After I said that NC State was unlikely to even make the tournament, now they’ve made it to the Sweet 16, along with Duke and Carolina. This is the first time one of my teams has made it that far since Wyoming’s Fennis Dembo dropped a 41-point bomb on Reggie Miller and UCLA (scroll down a little). The most fun basketball games I’ve ever attended were Wyoming’s home NIT games the year before that.

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