Listening to the Silence

For a second there, I didn’t know who you were talking about, then I remembered: she’s known as Michelle Maglalang on most of the leftie blogs these days. It seems fair to hold her to the same standard she used for Teresa Heinz Kerry.

But, then given the right’s fact-checking rigor (“self-correcting” is the phrase, I believe), her ignoring your recent posts is no great surprise. Feed aggregrators are a useful way to make you don’t miss anything.

This thrust from the Right will only get worse:

Among the many sub-plots to watch for in Wednesday’s State of the Union address will be President Bush’s appropriation of the words “freedom” and “liberty” for his agenda and the GOP.

As we’ve written before, the Republicans have dominated American policy debates through their manipulation and control of language. Whether through message discipline or superior framing (to use Lakoff’s term), the GOP has won a succession of victories spanning tax reform, Medicare, environmental policy, and more.

Bush’s 2005 State of the Union will be no exception to this strategy. Across both domestic and foreign policy, President Bush will position the Republicans as the party of “choice“, “liberty” and “freedom.” The dangerous and unneccessary privatization of Social Security through “personal accounts” will provide Americans greater freedom and control over their retirement security. Irresponsible and inequitable tax cuts will give Americans freedom to spend their money. School vouchers empower parental choice. New proposals for the Bush “Ownership Society” will free individuals to control their financial destiny. And that is just the beginning…

For more, see:

“Hijacking Freedom”

It’s stunning how little these guys have learned from “Mission Accomplished” and all the subsequent false dawns. There are a few notes of caution, but mostly it’s as if the election had occurred six months after the invasion, and none of the disasters of 2004 had ever happened.

I’m astonshed that she considers Crooked Timber to be part of the same level of discourse that she is; oh, I am not saying higher or lower, but it does seem clear that Crooked Timber’s posters respond more readily to pressures within their disciplines than to Reuters dispatches.

Note to Michelle: it’s an academic blog, and academics move slowly in order not to judge date prematurely.

Where did you get the idea that there was a negative correlation between hotness and craziness?

Hmm… Maybe the sentiments expressed by Malkin et al have at least an element of projection to them. After all, where was the entire right-wing blogging community last summer when Al Anbar province slipped into the hands of the Ba’athist/Salafi coalition? All the crowing after the flattening of Fallujah rather bothered me since it was their own Dear Leader’s decisions that led to Fallujah needing to be re-taken in the first place.

So I suspect that when right-ish bloggers charge their opponents of willfully ignoring news, it’s based on the notion that everyone operates in such a manner since they do.

Jeff Jarvis was harping about the same thing, chastising Kos and Atrios. Pierce’s remarks seem about right.

Malkin’s obviously, completely and entertainingly wrong about the lefty “silence”, and is in general crazy, but I have to defend that “anti-SUV bias” thing. It’s just a gag-shaped dig at whoever was incompetent enough to write “the vehicle fled the scene”, as though it had volition of its own. I am decidedly biased against SUVs, but I still thought it was a pretty funny line.

As Anita hinted at above, do you really need to defend yourself against someone who supports internment?

While I didn’t warrant a mention by the Big Time Blog Idiots, I did have one new commenter show up at my site, all indignant that I hadn’t said anything about the elections. Oh, excuse me, the ‘momentous’ elections.

I told him they were nice, but that I hadn’t said anything because I didn’t think they were that important. He squeaked in fury for a little bit and flounced off. I think I hurt his self-esteem.

And that’s what this is all about: the wingnuts want their egos stroked over this, and we bad, bad lefties aren’t obliging.

so you don’t own their courage, Glenn Reynolds, with your cornpone blah blah blah

Whatever happened to ‘You break it, You own it?’ What happened to all those ‘chickenhawk’ slurs, & saddling the 101st fighting keyboarders with responsibility for all Iraq’s woe? I guess Glenn and co. get to own all the nasty bits and none of the good bits?

Malkin’s body needs an election to appoint a new brain.