URLs du Jour

2008-03-10


Last Modified 2012-10-13 6:39 AM EDT

Shut Up, They Explained

John Hinderaker of Power Line reacts to a McCain-critical column from L. Brent Bozell. Bottom line:

If there are conservatives who sincerely believe that it makes little difference whether the Executive Branch is run by John McCain or Barack Obama, they are entitled to sit out the election. And if they're going to sit it out, I'd appreciate it if they would sit it out entirely; in other words, stop attacking McCain for his "impurities."

And Hugh Hewitt says: Amen.

Senator McCain understands the stakes and believes in winning the war. No matter the number or intensity of the other disagreements he has with conservatives, this ought to be enough to bring the base on board.

If it isn't, then I am with John: Sit it out. Entirely.

I'll be charitable: when normally excellent and thoughtful bloggers churn out thousands of words a day, they're bound to get it wrong at times. And this is one of those times.

Cheerleaders are one hundred percent behind the team. But you don't ask a cheerleader to provide insight. You don't expect a cheerleader to know (or even care) about the team's weak spots. And a cheerleader wouldn't tell you about them in any case.

And since you don't expect to hear a cheerleader's honest reporting about the weak spots, why should you really trust a cheerleader to be straight with you on the strong points either? You can't.

If you really want to get the whole story, you need to discount the cheerleaders heavily. They can be fun to watch, even interesting. They'll even tell you the truth, if it makes it past their self-censorship filters. (You'd want to check it with an independent source, though.)

In short, it's tough to take cheerleaders seriously.

John and Hugh (seemingly) want to be cheerleaders, put their critical faculties on hold until November or so, and break out the pom-poms for Our Team.

That would be bad enough, but they think that all like-minded people should be cheerleaders too. And if not, we should just "sit it out."

Pun Salad traffic is a mere flyspeck compared to those blogs, but for what it's worth, Pun Salad declines.


Last Modified 2008-03-10 6:19 PM EDT