blog report

Eat, Drink and Beat Kerry

May 20, 2004

On any given day, the blogosphere offers a virtual smorgasbord of convictions, conflicts and criticisms, sustaining readers of all political persuasions.

If you lean left, you might slake your thirst at Liquid List where today Shawn thanks Ed Gillespie, the Republican National Committee Chairman, for “demonstrating the flip-flop.” Shawn quotes Gillespie talking about 527s both before and after the FEC’s vote to not regulate the tax-exempt soft-money fundraising groups this year. Gillespie’s most recent “wordy and confusing” statements about 527s, according to Shawn, are “meant to disguise the fact that the Republican Party is going to start doing exactly what they decried so forcefully just months ago” –which is to say, make use of their own network of 527s. Liquid List also notes Kerry’s meeting with Nader “The Spoiler” yesterday and wonders ominously, “what will it be — blackmail? A payoff? The kneecaps? If only we could know …”

Still parched? Head over to Tapped, where you’ll find Matthew Yglesias puzzling over “hawkish commentary” by Instapundit and Tony Blankley. Wrote Instapundit: “Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn’t exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority — or even a large and angry minority — of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic.” To which Yglesias replies: “Stop being mean to the president or I’ll lead a mob to your door — has it come to that?” Yglesias quotes Blankley writing in The Washington Times: “It is heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president’s political and media opposition want the president’s defeat more than America’s victory. But that is the price we must pay for living in a free country. (Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently — although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.)” Yglesias’s retort? “The coverage of the war indicates that the policy is failing because the policy is failing, not because the press is out to get the president.” He adds, “… really, what kind of newspaper publishes a lament about the unconstitutionality of sedition laws? They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

Does the left make your stomach turn? For relief, get thee to Democrats Give Conservatives Indigestion where dgci hopes his readers “don’t get [all their news] from mainstream media …” Referencing the report that a US aircraft fired on what Iraqis said was a wedding party Wednesday, killing more than 40 people, dgci declares that “the mainstream media is positively a-twitter with delight in their reportage of it, even though US officials are disputing the media’s version of the story.” To dgci, this is “just another example of the media doing whatever it takes to make the U.S. look bad in Iraq, while the blog world brings you the truth.” How ’bout them apples?

At No More Apples, Motherlode agrees with Josh Marshall that Kerry is far from a “weak candidate … running an awful campaign.” The ‘lode asserts: “The Shrub is so incompetent and has surrounded himself with such incompetents, they will hang themselves.” Playing the unpaid advisor, Motherlode opines that “Kerry’s best position is to present himself as ‘presidential,’ exhibiting a sorrow, not a pleasure, that the US has been so ill-served by the current administration, and a confidence that he has a ‘better way.'”

What better way to end your online feast than with Absinthe & Cookies? Here, lth links to an essay in The Carmel Pinecone by a U.S. army captain stationed in southern Baghdad describing his daily duties, challenges and triumphs. The Pinecone‘s editors introduce the piece with this: “There are more than 120,000 American soldiers in Iraq. To the big city news media, however, only a handful of soldiers are newsworthy — the ones who had something horrible happen to them, and the ones who did something bad to somebody else.” The editors hope “to give voice to the vast majority of the troops on the front lines” by running essays by several local soldiers.

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Who needs absinthe to feel warm and fuzzy?

–Liz Cox Barrett

Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.