… no, not what I’m naming any of my children.
Now, I know that it’s become the style amongst many on the Left to not partake of the Instapundit, which is a crying shame, ‘cuz when you do you may end up missing stuff like this article about the role of blogs in the Trent Lott affair (from Gnovis). As it happens, all of this took place just before I stopped commenting on Atrios and dKos, so I remember how fascinating it was to watch the entire Lott affair hit escape velocity. Not to mention watching the eyeblinks as partisans from one side suddenly realized that the partisans from the other were screaming in agreement with them for once. Didn’t last, of course, but it was nice to see while it did.
As to the paper itself, it looks OK: reasonably balanced and gives proper props to Atrios and Marshall for breaking the story and keeping it in play until the conservative bloggers and the media (in that order) got on board. As the Instadude would say, real the whole thing.
Moe
I do read Instathingy, but tend to avoid getting into the posts where he gives an opinion.
This isn’t so much because I disagree with him, because we agree on about as much as we disagree.
But the whole nature of his ‘instant’ punditry means that his opinion is quite usually ill-informed. I mean, the sheer amount of times he updates those posts shows that he comments before being in possession of a sensible amount of facts.
Of course, being in possession of a sensible amount of facts doesn’t stop one being partisan. But going with a gut-reaction is not the best way to gauge politics. And then you get loads of people missing the updates and going away with an ill-informed idea.
My Instapundit reading is very much like my experience with Drudge. Started with both at the beginning, became increasingly disenchanted, then angry, then bored, then realized I hadn’t visited for a very long time.
The bored part came when I e-mailed Glenn to alert him to a particularly efficient smackdown from Kevin Drum. (As Instadude has become sloppier and sloppier, the corrections and pimp hands have increased.) Reynold’s response was not to refute it, or by the way to simply ignore my annoying missive, but to come back with the High Hat, suggesting that Calpundit should be so lucky as to occupy the same egosphere as he. (If memory serves, he didn’t use the word ‘egosphere’, but the paraphrase is accurate.)
Yawn. Delete.
I’ve got a lot of respect for Kevin Drum. He comes across as a thoughtful person, which, Lord knows, is a rare commodity in the politicoblogsphere.