Al and Fred and Michelle and Rudy
Jul 31, 2007 Blogophilia, Politics and Poker
I argued last week that Al la Pundit at Hot Air had it in for Rudy Giuliani. Now he’s responding to the charge that Hot Air is taking pot-shots at Fred Thompson, too, “just to prove he can.”
That certainly earns my “strange new respect.” My impression had been that, like much of the rightosphere, he was in the tank for Fred and found Rudy unacceptable for his softness on social issues. But Allah says he’s an equal-opportunity slammer; as I said in my previous post, he’s sure no partisan hack. He’ll slime whichever Republican sticks his neck out (even if he only sticks it out a little, as Fred is doing) for whatever he deems appropriate, writing:
[O]f course we’re not trying to Kos-ify him, not only because we don’t have anything remotely near the power needed to sink any major candidate (and neither does Kos, as Joe Lieberman could tell you) but no one has any reason to want to sink him. He may well be our best shot at winning. But if he’s done something wrong, we’re going to call him on it.
Okay, so as I said, I kind of get this. He’s being a fair broker, calling them as he sees them, and perhaps even providing a service by defusing anticipated slams from less friendly correspondents — the way lawyers use their own witnesses to testify about their own prior weakness or inconsistency and thereby soften the anticipated blow from an adversary.
But, of course, the “jury” here is mostly on one or the other side of the wall of Good and Evil, unfortunately. Allah will get no credit whatsoever for his evenhandedness; he works for Michelle Malkin, for heaven’s sake. (She’s even-handed too.) So what is he accomplishing? I’m not sure. Certainly it’s not his, or Michelle’s, job to parrot anyone’s party line or to be a hack. On the other hand, there are ways to acknowledge the faults of candidates that are generally acceptable to you — and who you are likely to support in the general election if they are nominated regardless of your qualms — short of calling then demagogues (as Allah did with Rudy last week).
Or is just Hot Air’s policy to be all-belligerent, all the time? That is, after all, the mode in political blogging, by and large. But if that’s the game plan, denying that Hot Air is just another Daily Kos (which some conservatives already have, anyway) rings pretty hollow. Almost, like, demagogic.
