The Joy of Huffington Post

by McQ | January 13, 2008 3:05 pm

HuffPo has become a must read for me. Why? Because there in all its glory you can see the vacuous reasoning of the left proudly displayed. And it is a must read because its value is contained in articles by lefties that would never, ever be accepted by the editor of a newspaper for the op-ed page. In other words, you get to see beneath – well beneath – the veneer.

For instance, yesterday I pointed to a piece by Lawrence O’Donnell in which he called John Edwards a loser[1]. No one but HuffPo is going to run something like that. And you remember the “scholarly” 5 piece series some English professor[2] was doing in which he proclaimed the military was the largest user of fuel (and contained egregious mistakes in calculations, assumptions and facts) and thus contributor to greenhouse gases? That series lasted for all of two of the scheduled five proving that even HuffPo has minimal standards.

But back to the O’Donnell piece. Jane Smiley[3] has taken O’Donnell to task and begins her criticism by saying:

When I read Lawrence O’Donnell’s post calling John Edwards a “loser” and threatening a lifetime of infamy if he doesn’t get out of the race, I immediately went to O’Donnell’s bio to see his party affiliation. I was sure it would say “R” — but it didn’t. It didn’t say anything.

Ms. Smiley, unable to find that factoid in the bio stopped her research abruptly. Google[4], it would seem, is something foreign to her. Of course had she availed herself of the search engine, she could have saved herself further embarrassment:

However, I am fairly sure in my own mind that Karl Rove paid him to write that post.

Ms. Smiley may have thought that to be a biting bit of sarcasm which nailed O’Donnell to the wall, except O’Donnell actually made a name for himself by naming Karl Rove as the primary source in the Valerie Plame affair[5]. Yeesh.

I mean, if you are a Dem, there’s plenty to pick apart in the O’Donnell rant, but starting out like this? Not so good.

Then, as she starts to make some half-way salient points about the Democratic candidates, she can’t help herself and has to throw this in:

If you believe that there was no Diebold factor in New Hampshire (something that I think requires further investigation but will not get it, I am sure) …

By the time you get there, you’re either laughing so hard you can’t stop or you’ve thrown your hands in the air and have moved on to another post. And, if you decide to see who Ms. Smiley is[6], you find another article in which she sings the praises of the NY Times, but says she’s canceled her subscription[7] because the paper hired Bill Kristol.

Finally we’re treated to her version of the standard boilerplate Rovian scheming – she assumes O’Donnell to be a part of since only a closet “R” would call John Edwards a loser – in which the armies of darkness are busily engaged in sabotaging the Democratic primaries. And given that foregone conclusion, Smiley puts a smiley face on the whole affair by saying:

But I thank him for one thing — he persuaded me to send a nice fat donation to John Edwards.

Nothing like tossing a little money down the old rat hole, but hey, I don’t mind since the Edwards campaign is going nowhere, and like the Kos strategy in Michigan, if it helps keep Edwards in the race a little longer and promotes further bickering and fighting among those on the left, it works for me.

But you should stop by HuffPo occasionally. You just can’t find this sort of mutton-headed silliness in newspapers.
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Published originally at QandO[8].