Memeorandum is not my homepage, although it might as well be — if you want to know what’s going on in the political blogosphere right now, it beats the pants off Technorati or Google’s BlogSearch. Normally here I’d say something about its impressive signal-to-noise ratio, but the fact is, there’s no noise. (On sister site Techmeme once, I saw a weeks-old story linked once. Once.)
It’s good enough that I tend to think that just by eyeballing it you can tell how big a particular story is. If that’s the case, then the Michael O’Hanlon/Kenneth Pollack op-ed in today’s New York Times may be the most talked-about newspaper article this year, at least:
Unlike many, perhaps most, stories listed by Memeorandum this one attracted attention from both the pro-war/conservative/righty bloggers as well as the anti-war/progressive/lefty bloggers. If you’ve read the op-ed, it’s not hard to see why. O’Hanlon and Pollack both supported the Iraq war at the outset — the latter expressly advocating it in an influential book — but changed their minds as the war continued and the rebuilding project went awry. Nowadays the right is grateful for any sign that the war might be winnable, especially if it comes from Democratic-aligned intellectuals, especially if it runs on the New York Times’ left-leaning op-ed page. Meanwhile, the left has at least as much invested in ending the very same war that the right wishes to continue, in discrediting Pollack and O’Hanlon’s work, by pointing out inconsistencies and oversights, not to mention disputing their anti-war credentials.
It is not, however, an even split.
So who wins this battle of wills? Well, if you trust Memeorandum creator Gabe Rivera’s secret sauce, and you trust my count (I’ve included the complete breakdown after the jump, if you’re feeling argumentative), and we focus on this iteration of the page (there were others), several more large blogs of the right hopped on this story than blogs of the left tried to burst it like a bubble: 37 to 18, with 10 online newspaper items and non-aligned bloggers making up the oft-overlooked third leg of the blogospheric debate. Still, take this with a grain of salt — The Huffington Post has more traffic than many of these blogs put together, while righty traffic leader Instapundit linked it approvingly, but as usual offered too little commentary to make the cut. And in the course of writing this, I have seen more than a few perfectly major blogs not linked here — but I still think it’s a pretty good representation.
If there’s nothing else to be said here, it’s a fitting story to capture (political) blogosphere-wide attention — the rightosphere came to be after 9/11 and to support war on terrorism, of which Iraq is consdidered a piece, while the leftosphere was built around opposition to the invasion, and frustration with moderate liberals who supported it — like, say, Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon.
Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood II: CFRed and the Globalist Conspiracy