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February 08, 2006BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Blog Power: Left Versus Right
Jim Geraghty, a blogger for National Review Online (and a former co-worker of mine at the now-defunct VoxCap.com), authored a piece in The Washington Times yesterday about blog power from the left and the right.
The bottom line of his column: Conservative blogs are good for the Republican Party, but liberal blogs are bad for the Democratic Party.
Jim made the case by highlighting the reaction of bloggers to the two most recent Supreme Court nominations -- the withdrawn nomination of Harriet Miers and the successful confirmation of Samuel Alito. He argued that conservative blogs helped prevent President Bush from making a mistake with the Miers nomination. On the other hand, he said, Democrats embarrassed themselves by embracing the liberal bloggers who advocated the unsuccessful filibuster of Alito's nomination.
"In the Miers case," Jim wrote, "it could be argued that bloggers on the right saved the president from making a critical mistake, and nudged him onto the path that ultimately led to [an] enormously significant part of his presidential legacy. But bloggers on the left are pushing their party into a difficult wilderness. ... Republicans can find strength and success by listening to their like-minded bloggers; Democrats can find strength and success by ignoring theirs."
The column prompted a curious retort from John Aravosis of Americablog.
Aravosis actually opposed a filibuster of Alito for much the same reasons Jim noted in his column. "[I]t is bad politics, and dangerous," Aravosis argued. But he dismissed the column, and without linking to it, on the grounds that it appeared in the Times -- "a Republican Party rag, yellow journalism at its best."
"If the Moonie paper is suggesting the Democrats run from the blogs," Aravosis wrote, "then it's because the Moonie paper thinks the blogs are an incredible asset to the Democratic Party and pose an incredible danger to the Republicans."
Posted by | 12:52 PM
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