Category: pots harping on the blackness of kettles

The Week In Wonkette

• Kathleen Parker recalls a high school book report and undergoes a severe mental paroxysm during which she realizes that if it weren't for narcissists like her, bloggers would have piloted the planet into the sun by now.

• Dick Cheney: he's in, he's out, he's in, he's out...why can't he be more like his daughter?

• Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei look back on 2005 with selective remembrances and rose-colored glasses.

• All dogs go to heaven, you know.

• Maureen Dowd infuses inscrutability with epochal melodrama.

• Hate to say I told you so, but we're not getting the government we wanted to get in Iraq.

• George Bush ain't gonna take no more shit from tsunamis.

• The Intelligent Designer doesn't have to be God, you know. Alien overlords who travel through time, why not?

• The only losers in the stupid War On Christmas are the stupid people who ruined their own stupid Christmas by stupidly insisting that such a stupid war existed in the first place.— DCEIVER

READ MORE: Kathleen Parker , blogging , blogs , crazy as hell , dick cheney , dogs , george bush , hannity and colmes , intelligent design , iraq elections , maureen dowd , pointless circumlocutions of journalistic diarrhea , pots harping on the blackness of kettles , times select , town hall , war on christmas , washington post , washington times , weathertainment

We Have Met The Enemy and It Is Us

Hey, who knew the "Terrified of Blogs" bandwagon had any space left to acommodate latecomers? Because somehow, Townhall.com's Kathleen Parker was able to successfully elbow her way on this week to sound a clarion call of warning about bloggers, "enemies" she breathlessly deems less interesting than "al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."

Parker works very hard to be fair, allowing that "some bloggers do their own reporting", "some bloggers offer superb commentary", and that she isn't trying to put down the "many brilliant people out there...who also happen to blog." She says, "They know who they are," and I naturally reply, "Why, thank you Kathleen! That's nice of you to say." She also offers some tidbits of wisdom that can't be faulted: "People tend to abuse power when it is unearned and will bring down others to enhance themselves." Well said, Kathleen -- I bet Valerie Plame would agree!

Nevertheless, her tone shifts spasmodically hither and yon.

She says things like, "Schadenfreude - pleasure in others' misfortunes - has become the new barbarity on an island called Blog." And this upsets me, mainly because no one at Gawker Media has told me about this island yet, and it sounds like fun.

Ultimately she reaches for a tenth-grade literary reference to make her point:

Each time I wander into blogdom, I'm reminded of the savage children stranded on an island in William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." Without adult supervision, they organize themselves into rival tribes, learn to hunt and kill, and eventually become murderous barbarians in the absence of a civilizing structure.

How tidy. But here's what's strange -- up until the moment I read this article, it never occured to me that Townhall itself was anything other than a blog itself. Can this be confirmed? Well, Parker does define blogs as "the angry offspring of narcissism's quickie marriage to instant gratification." So then we're agreed: Townhall.com is a blog.

Look, Kathleen, it's perfectly natural to see bloggers as fast and loose operators, working without oversight. But Lord of the Flies? That's unfair. As your column's existence proves, we're more than willing to give the most vacuous of twits a turn holding the conch.— DCEIVER

Lord of the blogs [Townhall]

READ MORE: bloggers , blogging , pots harping on the blackness of kettles , top

---