Wash. Monthly Blog Shows for Left, Name Calling = Political Analysis

December 30, 2007 | Filed Under Democrats/Leftists, Media Bias, News, Publius Contributor, Society/Culture, Uncategorized, Warner Todd Huston |

-By Warner Todd Huston

Now With Updates…Kristol responds to critics and Benen Responds to me!

Washington Monthly has a blog called Political Animal that is also picked up by the CBS News website. It is written by Kevin Drum, but recently has been guest penned by a former Clinton intern and Internet gadfly named Steve Benen who makes no bones about the fact that he is an extreme leftist. Looking over his Wash. Monthly blog posts shows that he also makes no bones about the fact that his chief mode of political analysis is to name call his opponents. None of his recent work, though, goes nearly as far as the hatred he displayed for conservative Bill Kristol, newly minted New York Times columnist and Editor of the Weekly Standard magazine. It looks like someone forgot to administer Stevie’s distemper shots or something, but it does go to show that the left is pretty comfortable with wild-eyed name calling in place of real political discourse.

Benen calls Kristol a “cast off from Time magazine,” a writer of “shallow, predictable tripe,”an embarrassment,” a speaker with “bitter, sycophantic belligerence,” a “thug,” “clownish,” and says that The New York Times has “damned standards and consequences” to have hired him. That’s quite a litany of name calling all stuffed into one short post nearly half of which consists of pulled quotes from other sources. Benen calls Kristol that many names in only six short paragraphs three of which are merely sentences instead of full paragraphs.

Quite an achievement, really.

The amusing thing is that Benen was an intern in the Clinton White House speech writing office! Looks like young Stevie wasn’t a very attentive intern, eh? Unless, he learned his potty mouth from Hillary who, form all accounts, was a screaming, lunatic while co-president in the 1990s.

Since Benen’s blog post is little else than a screed penned by an infant tyro, I’ll only bother with this one quote, one of the more egregious ones in the piece:

True, except now, one of the world’s most prestigious news outlets has apparently given this thug space on the most valuable media real estate in existence.

It isn’t surprising that a leftist in America resorts to calling his political opponent a “thug” as any glance at sites like the DailyKos and The Democratic Underground proves, but it is lamentable that the Washington Monthly, the Huffington Post and CBS News all give such a name caller a prominent place to show his childish, low-brow style of writing and make like it is serious political analysis.

Talk about a loss of “standards” and “damning the consequences,” both which the left in America sadly dispensed with as long ago as the reign of Tip O’Neill as Speaker of the House during Reagan’s terms in office.

**UPDATE NUMBER 1**

New NYT columnist Bill Kristol laughs at the libs with their “heads exploding” over his new position at the extreme left, so-called “paper of record.”

In an interview with Politico, Kristol said:

“I was flattered watching blogosphere heads explode. It was kind of amusing.”

And followed up with:

“contribut[ing] to the diversity of the Times is a worthwhile goal. And anyone threatening to cancel subscriptions can toughen up and take it.”

Hilarious that the leftists can’t take a little “diversity” of opinion, isn’t it? Of course, that IS the more “civilized,” more “caring,” more “tolerant” left we are all used to, isn’t it?

The fascists. (LOL)

**UPDATE NUMBER 2**

Well, Stevie Benen has responded to me on his personal blog, The Carpetbagger Report it appears! And his reply smacks of a “me thinks he doth protest too much” variety, too.

He groans on and on about hypocrisy without once addressing the charges pointedly brought against him; that he is a name caller and an unserious commentator on politics as a result.

Nothing is particularly worth quoting from his reply, but I was struck with the thought that, along with his penchant for lowbrow name-calling, he also has a bit of the soul of a magician. After all, his entire post was nothing but misdirection employed to force the reader to take his eye off Benen’s own perfidy whilst directing him to what he claims is evidence of mine.

Ah, blogger on blogger violence is always so sad, innit?
(And the comments are typically, unhinged leftism on display, too.)

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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston