Pirate's Cove

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!