At my old blog, I was fortunate enough to be right in the commenting sweetspot: just well enough read to have loyal, intelligent readers who would post the occasional thought of their own; not well enough known to attract the crazies. It’s pretty much the ideal situation (as far as commenting goes).
Not everyone is so lucky. Esquire, in fact, dedicated a short column to it in this month’s issue: “Major Human Flaw: Posting inane comments online.” This thought by stand up comedian Mike Birbiglia seemed especially relevant to me: “It’s as if Brian Williams finished every segment by saying ‘That’s all I got. Now, does anybody have any batshit zany e-mails they’d like me to read out loud?’”
Why did that seem relevant? Because of the comments posted after this column by Robert Novak, a recap by the noted political commentator on just how he’s doing in his fight with cancer and how he came to be diagnosed with the disease. I don’t know Mr. Novak terribly well—we’ve met a couple of times; I’m sure he wouldn’t remember my name—but I do know that saying terrible, terrible things about a person diagnosed with terminal brain cancer is a bad thing to do. You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about Ted Kennedy when he got sick.
Simple human decency doesn’t stop the average idiot commenter, however. Check it out. How can you type things like “You should be in jail for helping to expose a covert CIA agent! You should be prosecuted for treason! But, fortunately for you, you committed your crime during the ‘through-the-looking glass’ period of the Bush Jr. administration where former coke-heads become President; and war hero’s are ‘swift-boated’!” in response to a column about a person’s health? Why bother? Why venture out of the fever swamps to spew hatred? Even one commenter who had something nice to say ended the post with “Having said that, I must note, I do not agree with your political views.” No, you “must” not note that. You want to note it. And for no other reason than your petty insecurities.
I realize that idiot commenters are nothing new to the blogosphere. It’s still an awfully depressing phenomenon.
(h/t David Donadio)
There’s a great profile of Alec Baldwin in the New Yorker this week. The most insightful comment comes from his brother Billy, who was discussing Alec’s plans to make a western starring each of his siblings:
Basically, it was: Daniel’s the outlaw; I’m the riverboat gambler who gets all the pussy, the shallow, good-looking sap; Stephen’s the village idiot; and [Alec’s] the fucking hero! He’s the one who saves the day at the end; he’s the Clint Eastwood. If you’re looking for how my brother thinks about his brothers, and how he always felt about his brothers, that’s it. That’s the movie he wanted to make with his brothers.
Check out the whole story. It’s pretty great. For the record: I’ve been a fan of Alec Baldwin ever since I saw “Beetlejuice” however many years ago. Politics be damned…that man’s a great actor.
For reasons that would take an annoyingly long time to explain, I’m currently living in a house without cable television. So I really have no idea what is going on at the convention other than what I learn from Google Reader. And, unless Google Reader is lying to me in a most hideous fashion, Cindy McCain’s speech tonight was atrocious. Says Megan McArdle:
Cindy McCain scares me on every level. She broadcasts “trophy wife” in full HD, her plastic surgeon clearly has serious problems with impulse control, and her speaking style seems to have been developed for reading essays on “Why I Love America” at the eighth grade Arbor Day Assembly. And her one-on-one interviews are worse than bad. She delivers her answers with a thousand-yard-stare reminiscent of people under alien mind control in B movies. And just as in the B movies, there’s something vaguely, puzzlingly off about what she says. Have you met any people yet on your visit to Planet Earth?
This has nothing to do with whether or not you should vote for John McCain, of course; a world that endured Raisa Gorbachev can presumably take Cindy McCain in stride. But I wish she hadn’t been given a full half hour.
Holy crap. That’s the meanest (funny) thing I’ve read all day. And I’ve spent, at a minimum, twelve hours surfing the web in all its various incarnations. Kudos to you, Miss McArdle.
Living current politics like I’m a scholar studying an Early Roman emperor is one thing; trying to follow sports the same way is brutal. I love ESPN’s Gamecast, but having to watch the first game of the season as stats on a Flash programmed IE window? Kill me now. Even worse is trying to follow The Andy Roddick/Novak Djokavic match. Freaking brutal.
(Update: Thanks to John McCormack for linking here…hopefully some of you Standardites will stick around and check things out. Three years at the ‘Standard’ makes you my people, after all. You’ll dig this blog.)
The swipe at Obama’s time as a “community organizer” (which was prompted by Obama’s dismissive attitude towards Palin’s own experience) prompted a number of furious responses, but this was easily my favorite. From Daily Kos and elsewhere:
“Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor.”
I mean, really? You’re not giving Republicans enough to work with without explicitly calling Barack Obama Jesus Christ?
Do you remember back around, oh, the mid to late nineties, somewhere in that time frame? Do you remember just how much Republicans hated…HATED…Bill Clinton? I didn’t think much of it at the time (I was in middle school, after all), but looking back on that time once I got to college it never made a ton of sense. Clinton was putting cops on the street; he was reforming welfare; he was balancing the budget. He was doing a lot of things that the GOP wanted, and getting praise for doing so.
And this is what the GOP hated. It drove them nuts. Here was a Democrat stealing all their signature tactics and achieving no small measure of success as a result. The gall!
John McCain has just done the same exact thing to the Democrats and the media: He’s played a perfect game of identity politics bingo, a game that liberals are unused to losing. “But … But we’re the ones who are supposed to be making history this cycle” you can almost hear the Democrats shriek. “We had the woman candidate! We had the black candidate! We were the ones breaking down walls! How dare this old white guy maneuver us into a corner where we have to lambaste the choosing of an unqualified, under-represented group.”
That’s how you end up with the “New York Times” criticizing the Palin pick even when, in 1984, they wrote“where is it written that mere representatives aren’t qualified, like Geraldine Ferraro of Queens?…Where is it written that governors and mayors, like Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco, are too local, too provincial?…Presidential candidates have always chosen their running mates for reasons of practical demography, not idealized democracy.”
Do liberals really feel that a.) attacking this woman helps Barack Obama, or b.) that McCain’s going to take her off the ticket? I don’t see the first, and the second’s never gonna happen. But keep at it. Turn this into 2004 redux. Tell the voters that they’d have to be provincial redneck idiots to support this candidacy.
Thanks for coming by. This is really just a placeholder/test post. But since you took the time to stop by, I might as well make it worth your trouble by pointing you towards some of the best writing from the Olympics: Anthony Lane’s reports. Report one. Report two. Enjoy!
