Counting Our Blessings

I've often wondered what the threshold of experience and talent is to become a columnist.

Very low, I've guessed repeatedly over the years, as I and my fellow Northern Alliance members raked the likes of Nick Coleman and Lori Sturdevant and Brian "The Press Is Conservative" Lambert over the coals.

But then I look at the bright side; we could live in Toronto.

To wit: Antonia Zerbisias, in the Toronto Star.

She wrote this piece, claiming that the so-called "warbloggers" have fallen silent.

It begins like this:

The warblog drums are growing silent.
They're either running out of time, or money, or steam — or the conviction that Operation Iraqi Freedom was going to be a cakewalk in the sand.
If the above makes no sense to you, then you have not been paying attention to the chest-thumping chaterati of the cybersphere, a post 9/11 class of might-is-right and right-is-might wordsmiths who rode the "War on terror" wave with their warmongering web logs.
But now, with the news getting more dire, the quag more mired and the cost of war ever higher, the warbloggers find themselves on the wrong side of history. And so some of them are putting down their mice and putting up a white flag.

I'll spare you having to read the rest of it; her "point" is that since many "warbloggers" are not covering the war, 24-7-52, exclusively, anymore, it's proof that "we" think the war is a debacle.

Which warbloggers? The ones that insulted her - apparently the only conservative bloggers she reads. The whole piece is the sort of whiny, petulant screed you'd expect to read in a fourth-tier blog in full dudgeon over yet another de-linking controversy. Tripe.

It's a moronic conclusion, of course - most of the genuinely good coverage of the war is still coming from the likes of Belmont Club, Command Post, and a host of Military and Iraqi bloggers; reading a handful of these daily provide more coverage of the successes, and more honest coverage of the troubles in Iraq than a month in the major media, and more than Antonia Zerbisias will ever write in her entire, inexplicable career.

Posted by Mitch at May 17, 2004 05:02 AM