How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People.
The partisan bug doesn’t bite me very often.
Jim Geraghty described me (and Glenn Reynolds) yesterday as “laid-back libertarian-ish guys who want to see terrorists blown into tiny chunks and to be left alone on social issues.” And that’s a pretty fair description. Jim then added, “A smart Democratic candidate could win a whole bunch of votes from these types of folks.”
He’s right. In fact, last year I wrote that Bush “is begging me to support a Democrat in 2004.”
Politically, I can be pretty slutty. Support my position on the issue I think is most important, and you’ll probably get my vote. Democrat, Republican, whatever. I just like the attention, you know?
What I learned yesterday was something I already knew: The way to draw lots of traffic to your site is to trash one of the two major political parties. We had over 44,000 visits and nearly 60,000 page views here yesterday (not a record, but still second best), almost 400 comments (and counting) to a single post, 58 known Trackbacks and god knows how many other un-trackbacked links.
I already knew something else, too: I could write partisan drivel every day of the week. I could probably double or triple the traffic to this site, no problem.
But I won’t do it.
Nor shall I. He describes my attitude pretty well. I am not going to describe Democrats as “Dimocrats” or Republicans as “Repugs”. That just isn’t my style. If you want vitriol and ad-hominem attacks, go visit The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller or The Talking Dog
3 Comments
What have you got against hominy?
Hominy’s good eating. But it doesn’t look good spread all over a computer monitor.
I used to blame the likes of Atwater, Carville, and Rove for the increasingly nasty tone and mudslinging that now dominates political campaigns–but “we the people” deserve most of the blame. Moderate voices and reasoned discourse don’t generate the level of interest that comes with a good smear campaign. And that is our loss