The following should be self-explanatory. After ruminating for several days, I found myself waking to a full-fledged Diary entry dicatating itself in my brain. Let no one accuse me of being wishy-washy in my allegiances:
Here's the cliché, Ms. Huffington. I was one of your greatest fans. Really. With bonus points for your conversion leftward, a rarity in our locked-in-politics society. Ex automatic conservative writes in a foreign language more articulately and with a greater vocabulary than most native schmoes. That takes more than intelligence. It takes determination. That I was impressed is understatement.
Then you blew it. It's sad. You sullied your reputation by inaugurating your superfluous, exclusive website, the announcement of which I had to read twice lest I hallucinated. It was the concept, not the project itself, that alienated me. 2 or 300 of your closest bigshot friends? Some of them qualified, in which case they already write elsewhere, some of them clearly not, in which case why sponsor them? Drawing an overwhelmingly liberal audience which, as it turns out, can be as gushing, as obsequious, as subservient, as sycophantic, and as knee-jerk defensive as the most loathsome con.
A sobering education.
Nora Ephron, an institution unto herself, has been writing for over a generation; Kos points out she doesn't need the HuffPo as her forum. She misunderstands, deliberately or otherwise; he never said she couldn't write well; he said she got the gig because she's a celebrity. It's not only true; it's what he meant, he being the authority on his intentions. Nevertheless, the HuffPo fans support her. While over on Kos, the populists rise in rebellion. "I never did subscribe to Huffington's conceit," is the common paraphrase. Neither did I. But a few months ago, having dismissed several offending competitors on the blogosphere and in TVland, I found myself with extra time. So I gravitated to her website against my better judgment. I focused on the substance, ignored the pulp, gritted my teeth through the Academy Awards threads (Arianna, have you ever apologized for that?), until the mini-feud over George Clooney. Which forced her to admit error in not revealing his blog entry was actually a culling of statements in a variety of venues. And only after she dug in, justifying the unjustifiable, until her position could no longer be maintained.
It's an intriguing dilemma juxtaposed with at least two in the conservative milieu. As the weight of outrage reached a tipping point, so did the vehement objections compel Chris Matthews to acknowledge that not only a miniscule number of "lefties" abhor George Bush. And that backed-up charges of plagiarism do indeed warrant the swift loss of a job.
No more Arianna. I'd rather spend more time with Kos and read that many more books. In fact, as I complete my invective, I save it on email to submit in Diary form at the some-of-us-can-write-too-even-if-you-never-heard-of-us site, where the gatekeepers are as liberal as their philosophy, and where misspellings (forget to change "forget your pasword [sic]?" ?) don't remain for months on end since, apparently, no one is even minding the store.
If obscenities and personal attacks appear regularly, what is screened out? It's not a rhetorical question. Why the time delay? No matter, I'll never find out whether this made the cut. On your, and I use the word advisedly, elitist premises.