Annie
Diamond Member
- Nov 22, 2003
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I do get tired of the 'talking points from Rush, or O'Reilly', there are different alternative media. Yeah, links. BTW, this doesn't mean that O'Reilly or Rush do not say things that need to be said, but 'talking points'? Hardly:
http://www.blogpi.net/on-different-internets
http://www.blogpi.net/on-different-internets
On Different Internets
Published by WWB October 19th, 2006 in Republicans, Blog fights, Instapundit, Campaigns, Leftosphere vs. rightosphere, John McCain, PorkBusters
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 wasnt 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! Dont get in a war with conservative bloggers. If the media rips you guys apart, its 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. Im referring to one blog post, and I dont 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 Im saying on the program, and its a little one-page post that I responded to this morning in the first hour.
Im going to tell you the blog postings that I regularly read in my RSS reader. Ive communicated with many of the people who run them. Theyre fabulous people, starting with National Review Online, then Hugh Hewitt and his Townhall blog, Captain Ed, Ed Morrissey at Captains 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 dont forget anybody.) Little Green Footballs. I dont want to leave any out. A.J. Strata, Strata-Sphere. I dont want to leave anybody out here. The American Spectator. You here me talking about these. Im 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.
Im willing to bet dollars to puppy shakes that Limbaugh doesnt know who he is because Reynolds really isnt kidding when he says hes not a Republican. Id wager Pajamas Medias 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.
Limbaughs favorite bloggers are always on message, always hitting the days big news or arguing with the left. In contrast, consider the podcast Reynolds hosts with his wife sure, theyve 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 Frists 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 Limbaughs, to say the least.
Is Reynolds anti-left? No doubt hes wingnut enough for the moonbats to write him off. (The project of exposing him as a stealth reactionary certainly has its adherents, but thats old news.) But hes not pro-right enough for the serious GOP activists in the blogosphere to rely on him to push their agenda. To the extent that Reynolds is a political activist at all, he seems to prefer policy 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.