Lions and Tigers... and Bears! Oh My!

Like 99% of you reading this blog entry, each day we take a walk down the yellow brick road, now called cyberspace. We follow a well laid out path of news reports and stop along the way to read the comments from our favorite bloggers.

My personal yellow brick road takes my to about twelve different blogging sites ranging from The Daily Kos on the left to Michelle Malkin on the right with lots of stops in between. Of course the longest part of my journey is through the big dark forest of blogs otherwise known as The Huffington Post.

With all the huge news this past week, from the Rally for Darfur last Sunday to the worldwide Muslim riots over the Pope's choice of historic quotes, to Hugo Chavez UN diatribe (and great book promotion for Noam Chomsky) to the Senate "compromise" on military trials for insurgent detainees and the Geneva Convention, it's been absolutely fascinating to watch the differing perspectives on the news as revealed by bloggers left and right.

Those of you you follow similar yellow brick roads through Oz certainly know that the liberal and left progressive bloggers failed to cover the Rally for Darfur. This in spite of the headlining by George Clooney. It's a huge disappointment for all of us who used to fight arm in arm with the liberals for these types of causes. Most of the coverage, and there was a lot, came from non-political blogs.

Avid travelers of the brick road also know that the liberal and progressive left also generally ignored the Muslim riots and death threats on the Pope. Among the 200 bloggers over at Huffington, only three wrote about the issue, all to condemn the Pope. And one, David Patrick King, wrote only to further condemn the Pope for, among other failings, the abuse of American Catholics all those years they were forced to eat fish on Fridays. I'm not joking. I wish I was.

I'm not sure why the Pope Riots became a conservative cause. Malkin covered it with several articles each day. Even The Gay Patriot (generally no friend of the Catholic religion) covered it in depth.

And why no liberal outrage? Since the issues were religious intolerance and freedom of speech one would think this would bring out a number of liberals fighting for those causes.

But I've noticed this dichotomy for some time. Each news issue becomes property of either the liberals and progressives or the conservatives, but rarely both. And often I can't figure out why the issue appeals to only one side of the spectrum.

But one huge oddity jumped out at me last week. There is the most bizarre obsession on the left over Ann Coulter. What the hell is this all about?

I mean while not one blogger at Huffington thought the murder of a nun by Muslim extremists was worthy of note, a half dozen or more wrote to discuss or at least throw a passing condemnation on Coulter.

Would you like to see just a little of what HuffPo bloggers have written about Coulter. Just click here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here (by the way, sarcastic and mean sprirted does not make an article funny)

or here (actually about the new patron saint of liberals, Keith Obermann)

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here

or here.

And this is only in the last 30 days. I also omitted several articles where Ann was only mentioned in passing.

Why does the left take Coulter so damned seriously when the right generally ignores her?

I agree she is a bright sharp witted satirist. Her writing is often side splittingly funny. She has a rapier wit. And occasionally makes a good or valid point. Anyone who fails to read her column each week is poorer for it.

But Bill Mahar on the left is equally sharp witted and funny. Mahar is often simply brilliant and he cuts his opponents on the right to shreds. And Mahar has television series along with his blog writings (also over at Huffington). Yet the right ignores him.

And Al Franken and Jeanne Garofalo certainly can bludgeon the right to death. O.K., they're not as funny as Coulter, but they make their point.

But the right seems to ignore them all. In fact the right tends to ignore all personalities. Oh occasionally a war breaks out between two bloggers, but that is rare on either side of the blogosphere.

I like Ann. But she's simply not worth the keystrokes the left wastes on her. There are real lions, tigers and bears in these woods. Coulter is simply the scarecrow.

TECHNORATI TAGS: DARFUR ANN COULTER HUFFINGTON POST NOAM CHOMSKY MICHELLE MALKIN

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