"Spoiled and undisciplined"
I'm not and never have been "spoiled" and certainly can't be considered "undisciplined". I learned to write formally when I was in the Navy and exercise care in writing my blogs.

"readership in the dozens"
Actually, I have two readers for one blog and maybe three for another. "Readership in the dozens" sounds like an enviably large figure.

I'd guess she read a blog that took her right wing propaganda to task.

Columnist Kathleen Parker triggered another round of MSM animosity in the blogosphere this week with a blog-bashing piece titled "Lord Of The Blogs." While the article offered some pointed criticisms that no honest blogger could fairly refute, its ov...

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

Well, Kathleen, where does one start? You strike me as the kind of person who isn't used to having the shallowness of your thoughts bluntly treated as the thing it is -- shallowness of thought. You have trouble with "incivility" in the blogosphere, but you support a president and an administration that politely lie about matters of life and death and politely, cleverly embrace torture as state policy.

You're a fraud, Ms. Parker. First of all, you're a fraud to yourself and offended that a new and powerful voice is confronting you with that truth. Secondly, you're mad as hell that the blunt oppositional voices you don't want to hear can't be "supervised" and ultimately silenced. Your corporate world of words has been invaded and is being replaced by more refined intellects, Ms. Parker. Maybe you should open a boutique.

As well, my memory recalls that Bush spokescreatures neither denied nor even contested the accuracy of the claims in the documents when presented with them for the story.

So what you're left with, unless my memory is faulty, is an attack on the documents based on the idea that they could not be the original documents, since team Bush was careful to destroy all of the originals, so they must be reproductions.

If they are reproductions they must have been fabricated. If they were fabricated they must have been forged. If they were forged, they must be flase.

Spoiled and undisciplined, they have grabbed the mike and seized the stage, a privilege granted not by years in the trenches, but by virtue of a three-pronged plug and the miracle of WiFi.

Having lived in Orlando, I read Parker for some time, as the Sentinel is her flagship paper.

This is a repeated meme in her work: "years in the trenches" of journalism is how you earn a coveted op-ed slot.

She has never, to my knowledge, made the case why this should be so. A career at the city desk cranking out stories about 4-alarm fires, dog shows, and corruption at city hall does not, a priori, endow a journalist with the specialized knowledge to write well about economics, politics, education, foreign affairs, culture, or just about anything.

Watch Parker on "The Chris Matthews Show" to find a stunning weekly example of this phenomenon. She and the panels of her cohorts that Matthews assembles are deeply unqualified to have opinions about most of the subjects they talk about.

Hence, there are many horse-race/inside-baseball/pick-another-bad-metaphor discussions that are, at best, factesque, and, at worst, lazy and stupid.

Parker's column itself is a great example - no real research, no examples, no expert opinion. Just vague moral hectoring, beltway-style.

Parker should spend less time bemoaning the "power" bloggers are taking and more time examining what she has done with what power she has been granted.

And thank Jeebus for those gallant freepers, who, in their uncanny and unparalleled knowledge of typeface history and "kerning", managed to have a series of dissertations released to the world, about something they all managed to study from one pass on a TV screen (shades of Bill Frist), WITHIN TWO HOURS.

And, as is always the case with those ruffian blogger types, these people possessed so much innate credibility with the MSM, that OF COURSE their scholarly refutation of Mr. Rather and CBS News was, by the end of that evening, reprinted and accepted hands-down as FACT, literally everywhere.

All by themselves, I might add, with no assistance whatsoever from Karl Rove (that would be the same Karl Rove who also didn't have J.H. Hatfield's entire criminal record in the hands of every member of the media, before Mr. Hatfield's book on W was even published).

I can't believe that at this late date, "mainstream" commentators are still buying-into this BS. Oh wait, yes I can (other Irrefutable Universal Truths that "good" pundits know and believe: "Only Lefties oppose the Iraq War"; "Howard Dean is TOO ANGRY to run for president or lead the Democratic Party"; "only ANGRY LEFTIES don't like the president, who's a pretty good guy"; name your own Irrefutable Universal Truth, here!).

In the case of James Joyner, however, I'm stymied: is there an appropriate expression about a RUNNING clock, that's WRONG twice a day?

As someone else noted, bloggers are often acting as the watchdog of the MSM, as well as the government (something the MSM is doing infrequently these days). We are filling a huge void and, as more and more get recognition, the MSM will have to find ways to adapt or go the way of the Dodo.

Also, she missed one other point: unlike the major news outlets and local fishwraps, 99% of bloggers aren't worried about pissing off sponsors, advertisers, and the corporate suits that control our salaries.

We are unfettered by these constraints and, as such, are far more open to express our opinions and call a spade a spade, rather than trying to paint it as a diamond.

She is right, however, that a lot of blogs are crap. But she fails to note that many are great but not widely read for various reasons.

All in all, it sounds like she is just pissed that someone like Atrios or Kos gets more run than she does.

Blogs were OK with me when they seemed predominantly conservative back in 2002, but now that there are as many liberal blogs, and the most successful blog is not only liberal but unabashedly Democratic, I don't like them so much anymore.

We're going to hear more from conservatives about this over 2006 as things get worse.