… you—yes, you—should check out this post at America's North Shore Journal and do the right thing clickwise.
URLs du Jour
2008-01-10
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Language Logger Mark Liberman applies the same Google-hit methodology for "crazy
uncle"
that we do for "phony". Which presidential candidate is the craziest
uncle? I bet you can guess correctly before you click over there.
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Speaking of crazy uncles, by the way, I was never seduced by the Ron
Paul Revolution. So I'm not wounded by revelations
(brought to light in a New Republic article)
that his old newsletter was filled with unhealthy doses of bigotry and
paranoia. (And not the wacky charming variety of bigotry
and paranoia espoused by my crazy
uncle.)
But Virginia Postrel has a good point: why did the current staff of Reason magazine plop Paul on their magazine's cover and write an uncritical and superficial article about him? Why do I have to read this at the New Republic?
Virginia also has one of the best lines about another ex-Paul supporter:
As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.
Nor are his hatreds. -
But the best line I saw was from Washington Post genius
journalist and blogger Joel Achenbach, recovering from his stint
covering the primary:
In retrospect, I regret posting that item about Obama turning water to wine.
Idolatry: it happens to the best of us. -
But—wait a minute— the absolute best paragraph I saw
was from Prof Althouse in her provocatively titled post: "
Now, why
should we read all the articles about why everyone was wrong about New
Hampshire?"
The reason there's this subject at all is because they were wrong before, so why should I care what they say now. This punditry is an absurd racket. First, they get to make mistakes — scribble, scribble, scribble, making mistakes. And then, that's their raw material for a whole new set of articles. They can look at anything that has already happened and purport to say why it happened. And who's to say they're wrong, since it happened and they've come up with reasons? But when it hasn't happened yet, and they exercise their facility to come up with reasons for things, it's embarrassing when the thing doesn't happen. Unchastened, they keep writing. They have to. They're pundits.
That's only about half. Go read the rest.