The Politico is surely the most wonderful source of cutting-edge political information on any of the Internets, because whenever I look at it, I discover something I didn't know. For instance, today I learned that all of us Liberal Bloggers are totally shocked and horrified and terribly, terribly upset that the NY Times has hired William Kristol as its new opinion columnist.
The New York Times’ hiring of Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol to write for its op-ed page caused a frenzy in the liberal blogosphere Friday night, with threats of canceling subscriptions and claims that the Gray Lady had been hijacked by neo-cons.
I was away this past weekend doing family holiday stuff, and so I missed this, but I've been clicking around and I can't find a single liberal blogger calling for canceled subscriptions. Neither can I find much "frenzy." There's a lot of snark, and a lot of head shaking, but not anger. I'm not much surprised that the NYT has hired a thuggish wingnut clown. Who would be, who follows these things? Kristol is a joke -- a sick one, but still a joke; if that's the direction the NYT wants to go, well, on their heads be it. Too bad for them. And our public discourse. But no liberal blogger actually believes the NYT has positively contributed to that very much for the last couple of decades, primarily because they seem to want to define "intellectual diversity" as "treating lunatics like Bill Kristol seriously."
The simple fact is, Kristol is an extremist ideologue who is almost always wrong and doesn't especially care about that. That's simply accurate, and it's not "intolerant" to say so.
As for the online wingnuts who are screeching about how the liberals are screeching over this nonsense, well, they truly seem to believe that the NYT is the Master of the Liberal Universe, so they'll believe pretty much anything.
Anyway, I emailed the author of the Politico article about who exactly was demanding subscription-canceling. I feel like that Confederate Yankee guy, bravely fact-checking an ass, and so forth. Whee! I am a Citizen Journalist.
UPDATE: The author, Michael Calderone, responds! This Citizen Journamilising sure gets results. He informs me that the stuff about the "frenzy" in Teh Liberal Blogosphere and all the subscription-canceling stuff was based entirely on the comments thread of the HuffPo post that broke the story of the Kristol hire.
I had not previously known that the Huffington Post comments threads constituted "the liberal blogosphere." Again, thanks, Politico, for informing me of new information!
As I understand how this Citizen Journalism thing works, now we're supposed to visit the guy's house and then try to get him fired. Maybe I'll just have another beer, though.