John Kerry is taking a beating this morning from the conservative blogs, which isn’t exactly a surprising development, but it’s illustrative of the lopsided attention certain stories get. In this instance, while campaigning for Mich. Gov. Jennifer Granholm this weekend, Kerry weighed in on the situation/crisis/war in southern Lebanon. The Detroit News does the quoting:
“If I was president, this wouldn’t have happened,” said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John’s bar and grill in Detroit’s Cass Corridor.
And at the end of the article:
“This is about American security and Bush has failed. He has made it so much worse because of his lack of reality in going into Iraq.…We have to destroy Hezbollah,” he said.
Now see the link roundup at Memeorandum: As of 11:30 this morning, I count 22 right-leaning blogs to just 3 left-leaning ones. This is a pattern you’ll see time and time again if you watch the blog swarms: They’re almost always lopsided in favor of which side has an easier time getting indignant, based on what’s included in the report.
Kerry’s first comment does sound silly, and his Hezbollah comment does seem incoherent — both Wizbang and Below the Beltway deploy new variatons on the familiar “for * before he was against it” snowclone.
The Democratic Daily was one of the first liberal blogs to pick up on the Detroit News piece, but didn’t seem to anticipate the furor that was already developing. Marc Cooper has a similar take as many conservabloggers, though he doesn’t seem to relish the fact. Taylor Marsh comes the closest to offering a defense, asking what came between the ellipses in the final quote:
How do you go from Bush’s bumbling in Iraq to we have to destroy Hezbollah, ellipses notwithstanding? This is the sort of thing that is infuriating about the corporate media. They finish with lines like this that have no context, using ellipses to connect two far ranging topics of conversation.
That’s a good question, actually, and I’ll add that the first quote ends in a comma, which could owe merely to standard punctuation, or because Kerry kept talking. We just don’t know. And in fairness to the Detroit News, it probably isn’t the corporationy aspect of the media causing this problem, but a limited news hole and journalistic convention.
Now, Kerry may not be the liberal netroots’ favorite Senator, having supported him against more than a few second thoughts in 2004, but they did follow him into battle (metaphorically speaking), as happened with the Alito nomination fight. That didn’t turn out so well, though. Plus, for a year now Kerry has trailed “Other” and “No Freakin’ Clue” in Daily Kos’ regular WH ‘08 straw poll. Even if there was an obvious rejoinder, it’s far from certain the left would bother to bring it.
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