I’ve been asked more than once what I like about blogs.  I’ve produced a variety of answers but when I distill it down I come up with two words: prose and variety.  Up until a couple of years ago I could only read those writers that the media gatekeepers let through, but now thanks to blogs I can read all kinds of writing from pros and amateurs alike, and the scary part for the pros is that the amateurs’ prose is usually more interesting and colorful.  They have far more distinctive voices and because they aren’t edited (for the most part) it comes through loud and clear.  Here are two recent example that I’m sure would not have found the light of day just five years ago:

From Driftglass, taking on David Brooks’, whom he calls "Bobo", and his comparison of our reaction to Congressman Foley’s misdeeds to The Vagina Monologues:

No matter how many fleets of atomic-powered back-hoes the GOP leases
for a million dollars a minute from Halliburton to deepen the trenches
into which they have already sunk the bar for the minimally acceptable
level of degenerate Republican behavior, worms like Bobo will always
insist that somehow, some way, the non-GOP majority is somehow equally
awful and equally culpable.

Behold this snip from his latest masterpiece of mendacity…

This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who
befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking
them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.

The
second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her
neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up
to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave
her a satin teddy to wear.

Then she had sex with the girl,
which was interrupted when the girl’s mother called. Then she made the
girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.

The
first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The
second predator is a character in Eve Ensler’s play, “The Vagina
Monologues.”

And having “established” somewhere in the depleted nimbus of brain
cells that still scurry around in his soft head that a FICTIONAL
CHARACTER from a play is somehow exactly the same as a real child
predator, notice how his next paragraph begins (emphasis added)

“Foley is now universally reviled. But the Ensler play…”

And off we go on a dissertation on vile, lefty art and how “cosmopolitan culture” has just gone and ruined the social fabric.

Rooned I tell’s ya!

Desperate
to evade the question of why a child predator was allowed to range and
hunt free at the heart of the Family Values Party, and why virtually
the entire Party of Personal Responsibility is now bending every oar
hysterically ducking their Personal Responsibility, Bobo begins to
unload the strawmen by the job lot:

But why is one sexual predator despised and the other celebrated?

…he asks.

See kids, this is what happens when you drink the Koolaid, then lick
the Koolaid powder off the floor, then smoke the packet in came in:
Lying becomes so automatic to you – pulling out of your ass whatever
works to cover up the Scandal of the Day becomes such a reflex – that
you lose the capacity to distinguish between a character in a play and a real Congressman who hunts real children…

The honest answer to Bobo’s absurd question is, of course, is that Art is supposed to be provocative you imbecile. 

It is supposed to illuminate, not laminate. 

And
to get that job done, we allow Artists enormous latitude. We allow them
to create scary villains. Flawed heroes. Plots that creep us out. In
literature, we allow the Good Guys to lose. Badly. Or to drown. Or let
the life-saving fire they finally managed to strike with their frozen
fingers and last match to be smothered by a dollop of snow falling from
an overhanging limb…

And we allow it. Hell, we demand it. We need Provocation like we need
air: Without it, the Southron Slave Empire that the Red Staters
no-sot-secretly covet would be entering its three-hundred-and-fiftieth
year of continuous operation. Rape and murder of non-whites would still
be a God-sanctioned perk, and Dr. King would have ended up at the end
of a Conservative Christian rope the first time he opened his mouth and
said, “I am a Man.”

Congressmen, on the other hand, are not
hired to peel the skin off of the human soul and show us the miracles
and murder that contend in our hearts.

Congressmen are hired to do a job of work much like house painting and pothole-filling. 

Congressmen are not hired to molest children.

Congressmen are not hired to cover up for the molesters of children.

This
is a concept which is not beyond David Brooks’ comprehension, but
beyond his honor. He is not actually dumb enough not to know better,
because he is not a stupid man, but a despicable man.

When he dissembles to deflect judgment away from child sex predators and their enablers in his Party, he does it by choice.

Because he is a Good Republican and not a Good American.

Because
it does not matter how many times Republicans hits your grandma upside
the head with a shovel, Bobo will forever waddle onto the crime scene,
pick up the bloody weapon and screech, “But the Liberals…”

And from Fec, on describing a conservative blog conference in Greensboro last week (this boy can turn a phrase):

Weird moment:  Jim Capo asking Scott Johnson
to repeat his statement that the MSM was the mouthpiece of the
Democratic Party. The words were almost visible as they wafted over the
sheep. Capo followed the silly words in disbelief as they slowly
settled on the garbage.

Weird moment: Understanding that this is the future of the GOP and we are doomed, doomed I tell you.

Weird moment: Talking to the John Locke folks and realizing that
particularly in politics, nice guys finish last. They don’t understand
that all things are possible once you surrender your integrity. Man,
that’s too evil even for me, but worthy of contemplation. The idea
being that someone like me can thrive in the complete absence of
integrity.

Unless things change radically you won’t see writing like that in any op-ed column or on any mainstream media outlet of any kind.  They have to worry about ad sales and other business niceties while the others can speak/write their minds.  It’s kind of like barbershop banter writ large and I love it.

BTW, I think I’m going to adopt Driftglass’s "Because he is a Good Republican and Not a Good American" but replace "Republican" with "Politician." 

Also, Fec’s "all things are possible once you surrender your integrity" is this decade’s "carpe diem."

Update: As a raving moderate I am genetically predisposed to seeing both sides of every coin.  Here’s one reason you would be justified in thinking that blogs are a waste of, well, everything. Can we say TMI?