It appears that until about this time in the afternoon Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh had never heard of a weblog* called Instapundit (even his transcriber thinks the name of the site is “Insta-Pundit”). This was news to me, but it wasn’t necessarily a surprise.
To start, here a rambling Rush reproves Glenn Reynolds:
Now, I got a couple of e-mails I was checking here during the break from people who say, “Oh, no, Rush! Don’t get in a war with conservative bloggers. If the media rips you guys apart, it’s all over.” I am not at war with conservative bloggers. I quote countless posts from many blogs on this program. I use them as resources. I’m referring to one blog post, and I don’t even know who it is. This all got started when I cringed when I saw the use of the term “premortem” on a blog site called Insta-Pundit. … Whoever Insta-Pundit is, is letting somebody else reply to whatever it was I’m saying on the program, and it’s a little one-page post that I responded to this morning in the first hour.
I’m going to tell you the blog postings that I regularly read in my RSS reader. I’ve communicated with many of the people who run them. They’re fabulous people, starting with National Review Online, then Hugh Hewitt and his Townhall blog, Captain Ed, Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters. The three lawyers at Power Line. These are resources that I have added to everything else that I use for show prep which makes show prep an ongoing, never ending thing. Red State is another site.(I hope I don’t forget anybody.) Little Green Footballs. I don’t want to leave any out. A.J. Strata, Strata-Sphere. I don’t want to leave anybody out here. The American Spectator. You here me talking about these. I’m referring to two days’ worth of posts on this one site.
So Rush is on speaking terms with RSS and knows what blogs he likes — mostly well-established members of the right-blogosphere — and yet he has no apparent knowledge of just who this “Insta-Pundit” fellow is supposed to be? A little unusual, no? But the fact of the matter is, though their Democratic and left-leaning critics might be slow to realize it, Reynolds and Limbaugh are actually, in the parlance of our times, on different Internets.
I’m willing to bet dollars to puppy shakes that Limbaugh doesn’t know who he is because Reynolds really isn’t kidding when he says he’s not a Republican. I’d wager Pajamas Media’s endowment that Reynolds has never sent so much as an e-mail to the EIB Network, whereas Strata, Morrissey and the NROniks all have him saved in their Outlook.
Limbaugh’s favorite bloggers are always on message, always hitting the day’s big news or arguing with the left. In contrast, consider the podcast Reynolds hosts with his wife — sure, they’ve hosted Bill Frist more than once, but then Frist is clearly enamored with blogging; Reynolds just happens to be a friendly, a big dog, and Frist’s constituent to boot. Yet the Insta-Pundit and the (arguably more conservative) Insta-Wife have also turned over considerable airtime to Democrat Harold Ford and John McCain — who is no friend of Limbaugh’s, to say the least.
Is Reynolds anti-left? No doubt he’s wingnut enough for the moonbats to write him off. (The project of exposing him as a stealth reactionary certainly has its adherents, but that’s old news.) Yet he’s also not pro-right enough for serious GOP activists in the blogosphere to rely on him to push their agenda (nor their candidates). To the extent that Reynolds is a political activist at all, he seems to prefer policy and procedural reforms to party-building (c.f. PorkBusters).
Reynolds’ preferred reforms tend to be government-limiting and market-oriented, and the Limbaugh-sphere is certainly amenable to that. But whereas their online efforts are intended to elect Republicans, Reynolds spends less time bashing Democrats and more time evaluating digital cameras.
- According to a commenter, not quite. But it’s still clear he didn’t know a “heh” from an “indeed.”
As of this morning, the coalition of mostly right-leaning bloggers have narrowed down the suspects to just a handful of candidates: at least as of now it
Blog Traffic As A Reverse Bell Curve (Kind Of)
The comments to the Hotline On Call post that started the McCain/Mele Melee (feel free to borrow this phrase!) calls to mind, though doesn’t perfectly illustrate, a truism not just of politics but of the blogosphere in particular: Centrists are loved by no one, not even fellow centrists.
Originally, the post mistakenly identified Reynolds as “center-left.” Verbatim down to the formatting, reader Kathleen complained:
And so it was corrected — but a few hours later Not Marc (possibly referring to post co-author Marc Ambinder, perhaps even a handle of the Not Larry Sabato variety) disagreed with the updated descriptor:
Here at Blog P.I., we have cast aspersions on the oft-proctored renounce-your-allies tests employed by the left and right, and this is a typical case; Reynolds points readers to Little Green Footballs, but that shouldn’t constitute an endorsement of LGF’s commenters. This kind of guilt-by-association has unfairly dinged the man behind Big Orange, and Reynolds has said before this is one reason why he doesn’t have a comment section of his own — and singled out the Lizardoids as a specific example. For what it’s worth, he doesn’t even self-identify as conservative, but in much of the blogosphere, it really doesn’t matter what you call yourself. (Many of Reynolds’ own fans even dispute his non-conservatism.) And if you do describe yourself as “center” anything, you’re more likely to get burned at both ends.
I’d also wager that even moderates are more likely to criticize fellow moderates, because their independence in part defines them, and their particular issues are also different. Centrist is not a definite category like Left or Right; it’s a None of the Above or Other. And overall, there are fewer moderates driving big traffic compared to their more ideological (or more easily-pegged) peers.
If you lined up a sample of blogs according to ideology along a left-right axis, I predict you’d find something resembling an inverse bell curve — though traffic would drop off again as one approaches either fringe. On the other hand: While the high traffic sites are found closer to the edges, if the center of this curve describes an amalgam of different philosophies, a long-tail effect would flatten the curve, maybe a little, maybe a lot. So it could be a fat upside-down bell, if that makes any sense.
All of which presumes, of course, that one could even agree on how to classify individual blogs as lefterer and righterer (these should be real words) compared to their peers. Which raises too many questions for this post, and cries out for the sort of levity provided by Fred, also in the Hotline’s comments: