« From Little Rock To Africa | Main | CapitolLink: Ariel Sharon And Europe »
January 11, 2006BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Whack-A-Pol: The Sport Of Bloggers
This week's Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Samuel Alito appear to have given rise to a new sport in the blogosphere: Whack-A-Pol.
Here's how the game is played: Every time a senator pops up with a comment on Alito, bloggers whack 'em down with a rhetorical hammer. But unlike the game Whack-A-Mole, where the nimble moles often avoid the blows by ducking into their holes, no senator -- regardless of party or popularity outside the realm of mouth-to-mouth combat over judicial nominations -- can escape the jabs of bloggers. Even worse, bloggers tend to prefer hammers of the sledge variety to the padded pummeling tools used on those carnival rodents.
Read the potshot John Aravosis of Americablog took at Lindsey Graham, for instance. Aravosis apparently once thought that Graham might be different from his colleagues, but then he heard the South Carolina Republican address the issue of court reviews of "enemy combatants" being held in the war against terrorism.
"I'm disappointed to see that he has an evil, dishonest, political side just like most Republicans in town," Aravosis said.
That dig was tame compared with the one Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos leveled at Tom Coburn, R-Okla. "OK, Tom Coburn really IS a loon," he wrote after Coburn ranted about sodomy, prostitution and abortion.
Armando, another Daily Kos contributor, dismissed "Box Turtle Cornyn" -- that's John Cornyn, R-Texas -- as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party line. As near as I can tell, the box-turtle reference is to a much-maligned 2004 quote from Cornyn about rearing children "in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife." But in any case, it's definitely not a compliment.
Bloggers on the right have been even more brutal in bashing Democratic senators who dare to speak at or about Alito's confirmation hearings.
Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters called Russ Feingold a "jerk" for his "outright insulting" suggestion that Alito may have been prepped for the hearings a bit too much by White House staff. And National Review Online's Bench Memos accused Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, of being a demagogue for questioning Alito about the search of a suspected drug dealer's 10-year-old daughter.
Sometimes the senators' names alone lend themselves to attack. Alliterative headline references to "Buffoon Biden" and "Demagogue Durbin" (as in Dick Durbin, D-Ill.) are hard to resist. And when a senator like Joe Biden, D-Del., asks a question that takes more than three times as many words as Alito's answer, that just begs for commentary.
What it all comes down to is the reality that many bloggers (and many Americans, according to polls) just don't respect members of Congress.
Although he spoke only of Senate Democrats at the time, Mark Noonan of GOP Bloggers actually represented that general contempt of Congress quite well when he wrote this: "On behalf of all Americans, I'd like to apologize for making Judge Alito put up with a bunch of pontificating, partisan political ignoramouses (sic) as they preen themselves for the TV cameras. ... It is a farce. Why don't they just say 'we're going to vote on our pre-conceived desires' and allow Alito to go golfing instead of listening to this nonsense."
UPDATE: Morrissey's take on Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.: He is a "vacuous boob" who thinks Alito should be held responsible for his preferred reading materials.
Posted by | 01:10 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://amcblog.nationaljournal.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/428
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Whack-A-Pol: The Sport Of Bloggers:
» Alito vs the Blogosphere from Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of ...
This is what the state of political discourse has come to in the US – obfuscation through name calling, hyperbole and straw man bashing. [Read More]
Tracked on January 11, 2006 01:20 PM
» ALITO WATCH: BIGGEST SENATE WINDBAG from Michelle Malkin
***scroll for hearing updates*** Robert Bluey at Human Events Online has the results of yesterday's AlitoBlog poll: Which Democratic senator was the biggest windbag at the Judiciary Committee's round of opening statements about Judge Samuel Alito? With... [Read More]
Tracked on January 11, 2006 01:24 PM
» You Voted For Him, NY (Maybe) & Blogger Games from SerandEz
Continuing on activities for bloggers during these hearings, I see the Beltway Blogroll is hosting "Whack-A-Pol". For this Schumer comment, I think he easily classifies as a moron. And, if you can make a nominee's wife cry, when the person is intervi... [Read More]
Tracked on January 11, 2006 11:07 PM
» Alito 'The Untouchable' from All Things Beautiful
The Political Teen has the video of the incident, and Michelle has more on the Dems' disgusting behaviour, as well as the transcript... [Read More]
Tracked on January 12, 2006 07:13 AM
Comments
Correction: the "vacuous boob" remark came from a commenter on Morrissey's blog, not Morrissey himself.
Dave F | 01.12.06 02:07 AM
 |
