Crooks And Liars Upset About “Nutpicking” The Missiah’s Site

Via Little
Green Footballs
, we get from Crooks and Liars – When
‘nutpicking’ reaches the presidential campaign level
. This is the
kind of comic relief that just cannot be ignored

For quite a while, conservatives have embraced an annoying strategy — trawl
through liberal blogs’ comments sections in the hopes of finding intemperate
remarks. The right then takes these comments to “prove” that the left is made up
of unhinged radicals.

The practice has always been rather self-defeating. In fact, about a year
ago, Kevin Drum came up with a sensible
maxim
: “If you’re forced to rely on random blog commenters to make a point
about the prevalence of some form or another of disagreeable behavior, you’ve
pretty much made exactly the opposite point.” Eventually, the practice was even
given a name: “Nutpicking.”

But, see, the problem here is that yanking unhinged liberal/lefty/progressive
comments and posts is relatively easy. You can find them quickly. And these are
not obscure, irrelevant, fringe sites. These are the mainstream, like Kos,
Huffington Post, AMERICAblog, Crooks and Liars, and so on. You can find these
unhinged comments at places like the Washington Post and NY Times. And, oh,
yeah, Barack Obama’s official community website.

….There are a couple of problems with this approach. First, the Obama
campaign (to its credit) created an open online forum. Anyone can “post
a blog there,” and it’s not the campaign’s fault when someone adds offensive
content

First, each blog must be approved by the site administrators. I can’t call
them moderators, at least in the past. Second, how is it open, when early I ran
across multiple blog communities in which one must be accepted
as a member
, including a Muslim one?

C&L then tries the old “it’s happening at McCain’s site, too!” parlor
trick. Sure, it happens on the Right. But, tell you what: we’ll each start at
the same time, and see how many unhinged comments we can find. I bet I can find
hundreds, if not thousands, more on a port side site then any liberal can find
on a starboard leaner.

To wrap it up, Crooks and Liars are just upset, like the rest of the Left,
that some of us have picked up the annoying habit of quoting them in context.
Dey don’t like dat, Mon!

PS: let’s nutpick! 1. Steve Says: And fourth, nothing prevents
conservatives from posting offensive material on liberal blogs, and then
reporting their findings.

Heh!

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