Thursday, November 08, 2007

The Return of Planet AlthouseBut enough about me...let's talk about me

Is Kevin Drum a Clinton sycophant?

Anyway, I didn't look around long enough to tell if he writes in support of Hillary Clinton, which is something I wanted to do because he identified an anti-Clinton post of mine as a nominee for what he called — with pedestrian humor — "the Golden Wingnut Award." I understand that I ruffled some feathers with that harshly satirical post that took aim at Bill Clinton and a feminist who festoons her blog with images of breasts. You can hate that post all you want, but there's nothing right wing about it. If it's any wing, it's left.

[...]

Wanking and outflanking. If I had time, I'd write a poem.

But I don't have time. Not to write a poem and not to solve the mystery of whether Drum is on my case in service to the Clintons.

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I just searched for all my old posts with the name "Kevin Drum" so I could add a "Kevin Drum" tag, and I see that the very first time I ever mentioned his name on this blog was noting that he'd just called me a wingnut. Let's take a closer look at my first encounter with Kevin Drum, detector of wingnuts.

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly somehow saw fit to launch into an attack, calling me a "wingnut" and delivering an irrelevant lecture about how newspaper headlines are written and websites updated. You certainly can't tell from reading his garbled post that I was writing about changing the headline on the same article and changing it to something that did not fit the article. I've exchanged some emails with Drum, who has an elaborate justification for putting an inappropriate headline on one article so that the whole mix of headlines on the main page that day would not be excessively positive.

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But I have much more of a problem with Drum, who — despite his lecture about how websites can be frequently updated — has not seen fit to update his post and make it clear that he misrepresented my post. Frankly, he owes me a public apology, on his website, for calling me a wingnut and for ridiculing me based on his own misreading (or deliberate misrepresentation).