I just enabled the comments feature for the first time. When I started this blog two years ago I made a point of turning them off. I don't even recall my exact reasoning, but I'm sure it had something to do with being a control freak. I didn't like the idea of all sorts of strangers publishing stuff in my space that I didn't get to edit.

Now that seems laughably unlikely. Even at its peak I think my readership was somewhere in the low 20s. Right now I think it's about 20 less than that. This morning my blog input page recorded that Benzene has had 14 hits since midnight, which just goes to prove how unreliable the hit counter is as a tool for measuring actual readership. I think that was probably 13 search engine robots plus me getting ready to upload.

11:54:23 AM  [permalink]  comment []  

I was aware that there is a progressive talk radio station in Seattle, but until this week it never occurred to me to try to find it. Monday morning while driving to work I happened to be stopped behind a car with a bumper sticker advertising AM 1090, and I thought, "Hm, I think I'll listen to that right now." So I guess the bumper sticker did its job.

I remember two or three years ago debating with correspondents — maybe here, maybe elsewhere — about progressive talk radio. Given the undeniable fact that the Republican Party was winning votes by using obnoxious shouting and misleading or false arguments, the question was whether the Democratic Party ought to adopt similar tactics to win some votes back, with me arguing that they shouldn't.

The other side has gained some ground since then. Some talk radio hosts are better than others. I like Randi Rhodes much of the time, and there's a soft-spoken guy in San Francisco, whose voice but not name I can recall, I like even better. The guy I was listening to Monday morning, however (and whose name also escapes me), was a buffoon. He was trying to make the case that all Republicans since Ronald Reagan had conspired to ruin the economy. Following the typical formula for talk radio, his line of reasoning was roughly based on the truth but with so many gross exaggerations, distortions and overgeneralizations that it may as well have been false.

Even on the few points that weren't too vague to pin down, the fact checking was careless: David Stockman was characterized as Reagan's "chief financial advisor", which I don't think he ever was by any stretch of the definition. I was also suspicious of the claim that from the founding of the republic till the Reagan presidency, the United States had never had a trade deficit. That seems unlikely to me, but I don't actually know for sure. Anyone?

The larger point that Mr Talk Radio was making was to explain why he was "concerned" about Democrats winning back the Congress in 2006. His logic was that since the Republican malfeasance had set up the economy to be ruinously bad in the near future, perhaps it was better to let the Republicans win one more time, so that they, not us, will take the blame for it.

I've heard similar reasoning before (from partisans on the other side as well) and each time I hear it, I have to wonder: Why do you want to win? In this case, why does this guy prefer the Democratic Party at all? I should think it would be because he believes that Democrats' favored values, methods and goals make them more likely to run the government in a way that will be better for the country.

If it's really true that the economy has been so badly messed up that we're in danger of economic disaster, it seems to me that this is a time when it's all the more important to elect the people best qualified to avert or lessen that disaster. If you're on an old sailing ship headed into dangerous waters, would you argue that you don't want your best pilot at the helm because you're afraid he might be blamed for the bumpy ride? That's just silly.

It makes me wonder if these political pundits aren't so wrapped up in the idea of scoring points for their team that they've forgotten why they chose to root for that team in the first place.

11:14:26 AM  [permalink]  comment []