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Friday, February 29, 2008
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Responding to Foggy Bloggom
In latest issue of The National Interest, I have a small response to David Frum's "Foggy Bloggom" essay (see my initial reaction here) in which point out a few empirical problems with Frum's essay: In his essay, Frum suggests that bloggers are “pretty much the opposite” of the foreign-policy community, which “insists upon formal credentials, either academic or bureaucratic.” It is puzzling, then, that the first four bloggers quoted in Frum’s essay possess the very credentials that the foreign-policy community extols. Duncan “Atrios” Black holds a PhD in economics from an Ivy League institution. Matthew Yglesias is a Harvard graduate writing for the Atlantic. Steven Clemons is the director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. Glenn Greenwald is a Salon columnist and a partner in a DC law firm. Pajama-wearing stereotypes to the contrary, most influential bloggers possess the elite credentials necessary to crack the foreign-policy community.Read he whole thing -- Megan McArdle has a response letter as well. Publicly defending the credentials of Atrios, Matt Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and Steve Clemons leaves me in a grumpy mood, so blogging will be light for the rest of the day. posted by Dan on 02.29.08 at 11:03 AMComments: From McMegan's To be sure, George Bush has betrayed conservative principles with his spending plans and has not advanced their agenda very far. But at least he had conservative principles to betrayI've always found this assertion amongst conservatives to be fascinating. Where, I wonder, did they se the conservative principles in George W Bush? Would it be his string of spectacular failures as a businessman which required the repeated bailouts of his daddy's friends? Would it be the time up until his conversion at 40 spent in a drunken, perhaps drug addled haze? Was it in the way he used his daddy's political connections to get out of serving in Vietnam (which he seems to have not bothered to show up, of course). Guess we'll never know because although conservatives keep telling us that George was once a proud conservative who was poised to competently wage war on both the military and domestic spending front, they never articulate what those principles actually are. Sadly, though, he seems to have lost those principles - what ever they were - in some as yet unexplained tragic accident between the time he was elected and when we rolled into Baghdad in 2003. Ah, memories. posted by: Azael on 02.29.08 at 11:03 AM [permalink]ouch! very nicely put... :0) lc "I’ve vigorously debated Greenwald, Yglesias and Black in the blogosphere. In this case, however, I’m not sure the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s nice that Frum is trying to referee a debate among those to the left of him. I’d be much more interested, however, in his justification for why the netroots are in error with regard to neoconservatives. Simply put, given the track record of the past half decade, why shouldn’t the former replace the latter at the foreign-policy table?" posted by: lamont cranston on 02.29.08 at 11:03 AM [permalink]Post a Comment: |
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