Just a short and sweet diary at the end of the evening to talk about how ridiculous it is to read and respond to the right-wing blogs.
When you read a right-wing blog and are outraged by what's there, you're doing exactly what they want. They want activity. Whether it's good activity, or bad activity, it means attention's being paid to what they wrote. The same philosophy applies with talk radio. Talk radio hosts say things that they know will get people to call in - it's their way of hiking the numbers up, so they'll get advertisers. The right-wing blogs may be doing this for the sheer joy of a truly frothy blind rage, but I'll bet you that they show the numbers to their advertisers, too.
You give validity to their ravings by commenting on it. You might as well try to converse with a crazy person, or laugh at your kids when they try to light the dog on fire. Don't encourage them! Mark Noonan is pleased as punch that Hunter wrote a reply to his nasty little post. As wonderfully piercing as Hunter's reply was, it only threw fuel on the pit of
fire. Those guys will be talking about it for months.
Noonan comes back the very next day with a bunch of e-mails which he claims came from Kossacks (an update says that he assumes they were from Kossacks because they appeared after Hunter posted his diary.) They're all crude, and feature comments about phallatio, ass-f--ing, and s--t-eating. Except for one from Truepatriot, the only real Kossack, which said The Republican Party is Dead. None of them specifically addressed his diary. Yet he assumes that they're all from Kossacks, because Hunter alerted the Kossacks to Noonan's post. Now, why would Noonan do that? Because lots more people read DailyKos than read Blogs for Bush.
Which brings me to my main point. DailyKos has such a large population of people that we've achieved a sort of veracity by sheer numbers. We have so many people here, including lawyers, economists, historians, and politicians, that none of us can post bullshit with impunity. A post with Noonan's usual style and grace would fall to the bottom of the pile, ignored. Not because he's a Republican. Not because his opinions are distasteful. It's the intellectual laziness which he displays that makes his posts not worth reading. You'd get more valuable content from the back of a cereal box.
Kossacks: ignore what goes on in these extremist blogs. The more attention we pay to what they say, the more inflammatory stuff they'll write in response. It's beneath us. Blogs for Bush is the blog equivalent of the Flat Earth Society. Ignore them. There's much better things to do with our time.