Four-Star Story

"So McCain may well succeed and become the candidate of the Republican establishment. The problem is that, in 2008, that could be a poisoned chalice. For starters, parties have enormous difficulty winning three straight presidential elections. In the last half-century, Richard Nixon (1960), Hubert Humphrey (1968), Gerald Ford (1976), and Al Gore (2000) have failed. Only George H. W. Bush (1988) succeeded. Even in the best of circumstances, the public grows tired of one-party rule. And, for the GOP, 2008 will almost certainly not be the best of circumstances...

"So what should McCain do? He should still seek the Republican nomination--but take more care not to disfigure his public persona in the process. And, if he loses as a result, he should bolt the party, choose a respected Democrat as his running mate, and run as an Independent."

We've heard this argument before. We heard it when John Kerry wanted Johnny Mac as his running mate. Read my lips: Not gonna happen.

Lots of bloggy talk out there about this Washington Post profile of the woman behind the My Left Wing site. Sample paragraph:

"She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers 'malevolent,' a 'sociopath' and 'the Antichrist'? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as 'Satan,' or about Karl Rove, 'the devil'? Should it be about the 'evil' Republican Party, or the 'weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving' Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says 'I have a special place in my heart. . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned'?"

Maryscott O'Connor responds on her blog:

"I do not consider, nor have I ever promoted myself as the Spokesperson for the Angry Left. The fact that I have been designated or implied as such by two members of the corporate media is beyond my control; I deny such a claim, I repeat that I speak only for myself, and that is the best I can do. To those who would advise me that I should eschew the media altogether, I can only reply that it is an absurd suggestion. I blog because I want to be heard; when offered the opportunity to be heard by increasingly large numbers, I accept it.

"If anyone is offended by the very idea of my speaking my opinions into a larger megaphone than theirs, they are free to say so, but it is not for them to tell me what I may and may not do. To suggest, as someone actually did, that I ought to have asked permission of the left blogosphere to go on television and be profiled in a newspaper as a liberal blogger, is the height of surreal arrogance.

"I chose to allow a reporter into my home to observe and listen to me, and to report what he heard and saw in a major newspaper. I was under no illusion that I might be portrayed flatteringly or maliciously. I believed he would report the truth, and that, he did."

Marty Kaplan huffs about the piece at HuffPost:

"It's a reminder that the press loves to cover politics the way it covers religion: it's all dogma, darlings. We report; you decide. And if not as religion, then as psychodrama: since, insanely, it's taboo to assess the validity of the claims being made, the media tell us everything about the motives behind the claims, and nothing about their merits.

"The psychodiagnosis this Post piece offers of Maryscott O'Connor, it also extends to the whole lefty comment-o-sphere. (That means you.) But in making that diagnosis, the article inadvertently holds up a mirror to the sad pathology of contemporary journalism itself.

"In the article, we learn seemingly everything about Ms. O'Connor the person; it's a Dr. Phil-worthy bio that enables us to attribute her political anger to her past. Her blogging against Bush, her chain-smoking, her former drinking to excess? Ah, her father, we learn, was 'a 25-year-old Marine who died fighting in Vietnam three months before she was born, which she thinks helps explain the . . . the alcohol, the cigarettes and the very first piece of writing she ever published online, a rant against the war in Iraq that began, "Every single millisecond of my life was directly affected by the nightmare that was Vietnam."'

Um, it's a profile in which the woman gets to explain herself, not an opinion piece designed to examine whether her arguments against Bush are accurate.

The right also trashes the piece, with Chickenhawk Express seeing a hidden agenda:

"My question is why the Washington Post felt it appropriate or even necessary to profile a blogger that is, in her own words, 'insane with rage and grief.' Was it to promote blogging as a way to vent anger? Was it an attempt to discredit bloggers? I think it was nothing more than an easy way to get another negative Bush message in print using a far left over the edge blogger as the article's focus."