Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Arianna’s Cesspool

Most popular blogs have large communities of commenters that offer their two cents in the margins beneath a particular blog post.  I love reading blogs, but reading comments can truly be a mixed bag.  Sometimes, commenters make insightful observations or rebut an logical fallacy presented in the original post.  Often, though, the commenters sling mud at each other and reduce themselves to the cyberspace equivalent of a screaming match. 

Arianna Huffington's celebrity group blog is known for having, ahem, one of the least civil commenting corps in the business.  So long as someone writes an anti-Bush screed, the minions are kept happy.  Occasionally, a brave man or woman steps up to the plate and dares criticize the company line.  The results are not pretty.  Imagine a slab of meat thrown to a pack of starving greyhounds.  You get the picture.

Today I clicked on an item titled "Why I Left the Left" written by a jack-of-all-trades type named Seth Swirsky. His story, as you might imagine, concerned his eventual drift from the Democratic Party to the Republican, catalyzed of course by 9/11. His post started out well but soon became a tendentious rehash of the usual Reaganesque "the party left me" arguments, and in ordinary circumstances I would have stopped reading after about the fourth paragraph.  This time, though, I slogged through the rest of it just to see what sort of reaction Swirsky's piece would get in the comment section.  I now present to you what I consider to be a fairly representative selection of what the commenters had to say:

"The party didn't leave you, your sanity left you. Proudly voting for
Bush is like proudly proclaiming insanity, or admitting to prefer a
pretty fantasy over reality"

"Don't just leave the party.  leave the planet."

I should add that a few other people stepped in to defend Swirsky and a few made criticisms that weren't laced with hatred and vitriol.   But generally, you would have thought that this guy was a child molester given the reaction he go.

Yes, yes, comment sections on some of the right wing blogs are equally bad- if you ever doubt racism is dead and gone, for example, head over to Little Green Footballs sometime (no link- I won't even direct my meager amount of traffic over to that crowd- the truly curious can Google it if they want). 

Call me naive, but I think self-described liberals should rise above this sort of garbage.  I don't expect much of many conservatives and so I'm not as easily disappointed when they wail and gnash their teeth.   But christ- wishing a guy died because he likes Bush is taking things waaaaaay too far.