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It's a good read, taken as a whole (Von Drehle
does
go on at times, and you'll skip whole paragraphs if you're like me). Newmark I'd
heard of but rarely visited, while O'Brien I have often held up as the kind of
flame-throwing, arch-partisan who sees everything through a lens so distorted by
her passions and prejudices that it serves as a kind of cautionary tale -
something comes to mind about staring
into the abyss, for example. Only the most recent example is linked
here.
Newmark seems a rather strange
choice to offset O'Brien - one gets the sense from the Mahablog that the world
falls into three camps: There are the "Bushies, righties and fundies" in one
camp; the "Vichycrats" - insufficiently partisan Democrats who enable them in
another; and finally those, like O'Brien, who can see that the sky really is
falling, and that "we're all screwed." Newmark, on the other hand, is described
as:"(A)
small-government conservative with libertarian leanings on social issues.
'Working in public schools, I've seen how poorly the government runs things,'
she says.
Her breed of thinker is quite
common among the right blogosphere. Newmark's philosophy of deregulation,
muscular foreign policy and a live-and-let-live take on social issues is
thriving on the Internet... When readers (come) to Betsy's Page, they find a
modest and good-natured voice, compared with the name-calling and screeds that
can make the blogosphere feel like 'Crossfire' with Tourette's syndrome. In
fact, Newmark seems to have nothing personal against liberals. 'Of course I have
liberal friends,' she says, 'I'm a schoolteacher!' "
Doesn't Ann Coulter blog? She'd seem a
better choice, if O'Brien is to define one end of the
scale.
But would you take it ill of
me, gentle reader, if I juxtapose these paragraphs, without any further
comment?
O'Brien:
"We are to Iraq what Syria is to
Lebanon..."
Newmark:
"I think we're beginning to see
just the first positive effects, positive impacts, of the decision to remove
Saddam Hussein... in Central Asia, in the decision by Libya to disarm, in
Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, Musharraf in Pakistan -- people forget that he
wasn't always an ally."
Or these paragraphs?
On Newmark:
"She rises at 5:30 each morning
so she can surf the Web -- the New York Times, The Washington Post and
Lucianne.com are her early destinations -- and then blogs for an hour before
getting ready for work."
On
O'Brien: "... she's living on an
inheritance left by her thrifty parents and wondering why life seems so
different these days."
And contrast
that last quote from O'Brien with this one, on Bush:
"If he wasn't born into that
family he would be an assistant manager at Wal-Mart."
As I said, an interesting read.
Maybe even enlightening.
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