If the Kerry camp is just recently taking the gloves off, then it’s safe to say that bloggers never had them on.
Jonah Goldberg doesn’t even seem to own a pair — he mocks Kerry for calling Bush’s negative ads “misleadisments,” branding this latest linguistic effort as “lameness wrapped in dorkiness swaddled in wimpiness.” Goldberg also wonders why “I could only find this tidbit in foreign newspapers” (as if this is a bad thing?).
Matthew Yglesias fires back with the point that the problem with the “hey, everyone makes mistakes” defense of the Bush administration is that “despite the mistakes he’s made he doesn’t think he’s made any.”
At the American Prospect‘s Tapped, Jeffrey Dubner takes the usually savage Bill O’Reilly to task for morphing into a lap dog during his interview with President Bush, and “cushioning” his questions. Dubner rips up O’Reilly’s focus on chemical weapons, sarcastically inquiring, “my memory may be a little shaky, but weren’t nuclear weapons more fervently presented as the most resonant casus belli in the months leading up to the war? I seem to recall something about a ‘smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud’ and Dick Cheney’s belief that Saddam Hussein ‘has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.'”
David Adesnik at Oxblog locks horns with the New York Times Magazine‘s meandering opus on bloggers, noting that the piece “amplifies its message that bloggers lack substance by focusing on its subjects’ personalities and personal quirks far more than their ideas.” Adesnik ends his post with a little jujitsu: “In the final analysis, I don’t think that professional journalists’ unfair assessment of blogs does all that much harm. Our reputation will rise and fall with because of what we do, not because of what others say. If we keep exposing the incompetence of veteran anchormen, they won’t be able to write us off as amateurs. For the moment, even bad PR is good PR. The more people who know that we exist, the more people will learn about what we really do.”
And Wonkette throws a punch at Fox News over its debut in Canada. Putting Fox on the Canadian airwaves, she bemoans, is like “broadcasting the Playboy channel into a nunnery.” Thank God, Wonkette remarks, that Canadians have national health care.
In the midst of the bare-knuckled fists flying about, Andrew Sullivan offers a little love. He cuddles Tony Blair’s recent speech to his party conference, following an excerpt of the PM with a reverent “A-frigging-men.” Granted, there’s a little tough love for Bush — Sullivan notes that Blair’s speech was “more eloquent and more candid than anything Bush has said.” But Kerry is the one really elbowed out of the hug, as Sullivan concludes that “Blair reminds us why this current struggle in Iraq is indeed a critical struggle in the war… I don’t believe Iraq is a ‘diversion’ from the war on terror; I believe it’s the central front. If you share this view, Blair’s view, it’s extremely hard to support Kerry.”
Wrapping up this report with the latest from our blogosphere weather channel: Debate forecasts for Bush range from patchy clouds to sunny with a very slim chance of downpours. As for his part, Joshua Marshall doesn’t like the look of a developing post-debate Hurricane Spin.
We’ll see if any of these guys has a better batting average than the real Weather Channel.
–Susanna Dilliplane
Susanna Dilliplane is a contributor to CJR.