In defense of us

First this: something happened to both my desktop and my laptop: the band that shows the URL of whatever I'm reading somehow went on the blink. So links are out until I fix this.

So I'll simply write this.

Byron York (at present, my role model in all things, a reporter as well as commentator), writes this at NRO from John McCain's commencement address at Liberty University:

While McCain's speech at Liberty University was about reconciliation, he did take a jab or two at the occasional villain. Like…bloggers:

When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

Okay, me again. Couple of comments:

1. If McCain thinks the blogosphere is the bastion of the uninformed young, he's crazy. The notion of a nineteen year-old sophomore blogging on Bushhitlermustdie.org in some Founders' Hall someplace is the popular cliche of the genre, but it is woefully misinformed. Dean Barnett, the sainted Soxblog, goes over his hate email every day and has written more than once about the explosion of pissy, hateful bloggers in the over-40 category.

2. One of the wonderful things about the blogosphere is its utter meritocracy. Come to play, or don't come. Be good or be gone. Idiocies are exposed fairly rapidly (for this, see Cole, Juan, who nevertheless may end up tenured at my pal Cinco Paul's Yale University), and inaccuracies are pounced upon. The blogosphere has taken by storm the educated over-40 set, those who have peddled idiocies since their respective ages of reason, and now have to watch said idiocies pounded to bits. No, Super Bowl Sunday is not the number-one day for spousal abuse, if for no other reason than that during a football game a husband is either unaware of his wife's existence or shocked by her fanaticism for the home team (see McDade, Roseanne). No, Thomas Jefferson never wrote "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." No, George Bush 41 wasn't stunned into rapture by a supermarket scanner (for no other reason than trade shows do not exist to push seven year-old technology.) Again and again, it's more often people my own age who push the nonsense, and less so people my students' age.

3. Finally, a story along those lines. Two summers ago, June 2004, I was at a conference at Evergreen State, in Washington State, near Olympia. This is one of those woodsy, fanatical leftist colleges that post, outside the library, signs proscribing perfume. Perfume! Anyway, the people I dealt with at the conference were marvelous and filled with humor--until it came to the hated Bush. This happened to be the week that Farenheit 9/11 opened up in Seattle, and on the Thursday night of the week I was there, a group of professors drove an hour north to Seattle, then waited two hours in line to see it. The following day, all were predictably swooning over the event. One of them, knowing I was from Houston, told me, "You'd better see it here. You know they're going to try and close it down in Texas."

They're going to try and close it down in Texas.This from a doctorate, a professor, for God's sake, in her early 50s. When I went home to Houston, I emailed her that the movie was playing in a theatre not four miles from Bush 41's house. Her response was, Really, how can he live with the shame?