Swift Reactions 7

As I am feeling a bit too lazy to write an actual blog post today, I think it is time for another edition of Swift Reactions, where I focus on what you, my dear readers, have written and do as little of my own writing as possible. And this week I focus as well on what my non-readers are saying about me after not reading what I have written.

One of the great things about having a blog is that sometimes I get to interact with people who probably wouldn't give me the time of day if I met them on the street and asked them what time it was. My piece "Journalism 101," which laid out a handy list of the 20 basic Rules of Journalism, provoked responses from a number of real journalists who emailed me or commented on their sites, including Eric Alterman, Dan Gillmor, The Spokesman-Review, Ed Cone, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Aregood of The Guardian, Jeff Cohen (who sent me a very kind email) and Dan Froomkin, who emailed me to say cryptically that he found my piece "painful." But perhaps none was so generous as former Vanity Fair writer Jesse Kornbluth, author of six books I have not actually read and founder of Head Butler, who took time out of his busy schedule to send me an email schooling me on the finer points of journalism. "You worked on your high school paper --- could you have worked on your college paper with those views? Doubtful," wrote Mr. Kornbluth. "I practiced the craft for 30+ years. At a high level. I love objectivity. But 'John Kerry lied about his service' and 'John Kerry is being slandered' --- that, pal, is where journalism BEGINS, not ends. You get the bucks to find the truth. And report it clearly, while acknowledging the path that led you there. But why I am writing to you? You wrote for a high school paper. And now you have a blog. And you're a finalist in some blog contest. Is this a great country, or what?" Indeed, it is a great country, Mr. Kornbluth, and I'm happy to see you have not forgotten Rule No. 3, that "journalists are Americans first, journalists second and human beings third."

Rule No. 6 according to the Rules of Journalism is "If both liberals and conservatives criticize you, that must mean you are doing something right," and considering all the negative feedback I got for this piece, I must have been doing something right. Not surprisingly, much of the harshest criticism came from my most frequent commenter, Anonymous, who has been acting very strangely recently. Either he has developed multiple personality disorder or a number of different commenters are impersonating him. Michael Plank, Julia and Porlock Junior all pointed out that Anonymous was coincidentally once Joe Klein's pseudonym. It wouldn't be too surprising if Klein himself might have commented here as Anonymous, though he would no doubt deny it vehemently. In fact, he would probably stake his credibility on it. While Anonymous did not deny being Joe Klein, he did deny being Mark Halperin, Ann Coulter, Alex Rawls, and Michael Fumento, which narrows down the possibilities considerably.

Anonymous called my piece on Mark Halperin "line after line of waspish, envy driven ad hominem," and called my "Journalism 101" piece " a huge load of excrement" and claimed his "head just exploded" after reading it, which sounds quite painful and certainly was not my intention. My friends Carl and Chuck Butcher valiantly defended me throughout these threads and Chuck even challenged Anonymous to post a comment on his own blog under a recognizable moniker, which he did in this post under the name "a reasonable conservative," apparently in tribute to me. (Type the words "reasonable conservative" into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky" and see what happens.)

Several of my critics boasted proudly here and elsewhere that they could not manage to even read the entire piece before they felt compelled to comment on it. I have long said that you don't have to read a book to review it and I have to admit sometimes I can't even read my own posts all the way through, much less entire posts on other people's blogs. In fact, recently, someone I have never heard of reviewed my blog, but I'm afraid I have no idea what she said because the type just seemed a bit too small for me to bother reading the review. I did, however, leave a comment thanking her for the review and expressing how much I liked the background color and the little icons she appended to the end of the review. I do hope it was a positive review.

Not reading the work of someone you are criticizing also seems to be surprisingly popular in the halls of academia, where I thought reading was actually required as part of the job description. Professors Jeff Goldstein and Ann Althouse, perhaps fearing that their heads might literally explode, both claimed that they had not read my blog before launching very personal attacks on me. Mr. Goldstein not only claimed several times that he had not read a post he then proceeded to subject to painful semiotic analysis, he even claimed, somewhat dubiously, that he had actually gone to the post's page and scrolled down (no doubt with one hand covering his eyes as he pressed the PgDn key with the index finger of the other) in order to attack one of the comments on the piece.

When I left a comment on yet another of Ms. Althouse's continuing series of anti-Hillary pieces saying that it appeared to me if Hillary got elected she might suffer the same unfortunate fate as David Broder, a comment that was full of genuine concern for her health, she took it all wrong and lashed out at me. At first it was quite upsetting, though then I realized that may just be how she expresses affection. "Don't you think you should have to be more of a wit to live up to your name?" she asked me. I replied: "I don't quite understand how living up to my name, which I have said on many occasions is a tribute to the brave Swift Boat Veterans, requires me to be witty anymore than your living up to your name requires you to be a creaky old house." When I pointed out that she had apparently misread the piece, she replied, "I didn't read your piece. Don't flatter yourself," implying, it seemed, that her actually reading another person's work before she attacked that person was a privilege she bestowed only on a rare and worthy few. "Who's flattering whom?" I wondered.

Both Goldstein and Althouse are teachers and if any of their students are reading this, they might like to know that they don't have to bother reading any of the assigned texts (since their teachers probably haven't) or worry about putting too much effort into papers they write for class because their professors are probably not going to read those either before giving them a low grade. If you can now get a job at a university without having to read and you can just spout whatever crazy things happen to come into your head, then this just might be a line of work for which I am especially suited.

Not all of the comments on my recent pieces here were negative ones, of course, and there were some very constructive contributions to the discourse. Commenting on Mark Halperin's proposal that journalists stop covering campaigns like horse races, Out of Context suggested, "It may be easier to improve things by changing the way horse races are covered." My good friend Miss Cellenia very kindly said, "No one ever needs to say anything about journalism again, because you've covered it all here," which considering her exhaustive and encyclopedic coverage of everything from Alien Abduction to Zombies was very high praise indeed. skippy the bush kangaroo paid me a very kind compliment by starting a rumor that I not only write all of the comments on my blog but all of the comments and posts on his blog as well, which I don't mind people believing but I am forced to deny. But perhaps the best suggestion I have received recently was from -- you guessed it -- Anonymous, who said, "I can only assume that George Soros pays you by the word." All I can say to that is from your lips to George Soros' ears.