Wednesday October 17, 2007

SURROUNDED BY ENEMIES. The Ole Perfesser:

READER PAUL STINCHFIELD WRITES that he's unhappy PC Magazine's list of their 100 favorite blogs includes only political blogs that lean left. Well, he's right unless you count Drudge as a blog (Drudge doesn't) but the PC Mag folks say the list is subjective, and a list of favorites can't be wrong, so long as those blogs really are their favorites. I guess it just tells us where they stand politically.

But hey, it's "PC" Magazine, right?

What a strange, passive-aggressive sentiment. First, the only straight-up liberal politics blogs on the list are Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and (I suppose) Wonkette. Drudge is accompanied on the list by Perfesser fave Buzz Machine, which, like many of the named sites, treats new tech, but also lards in plenty of conservative political ramblings. Not much of an edge there.

There are a few environmental blogs listed, and one of them has at this writing a picture of Al Gore without devil horns photoshopped on his head. Also one of them is about black people. Secret-agenda wise, maybe you could read those in. Overwhelmingly, though, the list is all geekery and screen-sports for young urbanites with disposable income: meta-comics, gizmos, restaurant reviews, fashion and entertainment snark.

Maybe the thinking here is that any blog not overtly conservative is liberal. Rightwing blogs of the sort the Perfesser favors increasingly take the default position that liberals are "Americaphobes," the New York Times is a treason mill, and America is not fighting enough wars. If you subscribe to this dire worldview, you may well believe that bloggers who prefer to engage in fun and games instead of continually sounding the tocsin against leftist perfidy are, in the time-honored phrase, not with you but against you.

As I have observed before, for these people the personal is indeed the political. I wonder why they didn't choose to flip it around, though? Why not claim the tech blogs are conservative, since progress is good and all good things are conservative? Comics blogs could be conservative too, since comics are fun and conservatives are all about fun. Come on, fellas. It's not like this sort of thing hasn't been done

Maybe they aren't feeling as confident as they once did, for some reason.