Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

There's a story that's running currently in a well-known American paper that is exactly the type of thing that critics of modern journalism -- which is most of us, nowadays -- have been arguing has been missing in today's world of shrinking newsrooms and warped priorities.

It's investigative reporting on an issue that is locally important to its readers. It's pointing up major flaws in the hometown police department. What's more, the story is a good read that's presented with all the high-tech bells and whistles that you'd want in 2008 -- in an era when news organizations need more Internet traffic to survive, it is driving a ton of traffic to their site. Rather than dump a ton of information in a large unreadable blob, like newspapers did in the 1980s when circulation started dropping, the story has been neatly re-packaged into 12 bite-sized parts.

If you've read this far, and you're one of the handful of readers around here who cares about journalism reform, you'd probably be saying "awesome" and "right on" to the newspaper involved.

Now, what if I tell you that the local city is America's city, Washington, D.C.?

And that the murder victim is Chandra Levy?

Did your heart just drop? Did your opinion instantly change? Based on the amazing amount of scorn that's being heaped on the Washington Post for running this series, it probably did.

-- WILL BUNCH

Could someone please explain to me the non-rhetorical differences between Sen. Obama's Iraq policy and Sen. McCain's Iraq policy? I think I’ve become confused. Citations would be helpful.

As best as I can tell Sen. Obama intends to leave a substantial force in Iraq and call it "withdrawal" and Sen. McCain intends to leave a substantial force in Iraq and call it "victory." The sole difference I can see is that Sen. Obama sees the missions for the force as operations against Al Qaeda in Iraq (if any), training the Iraqi military, protecting U. S. assets in the country, and force protection while Sen. McCain would add to those missions providing security for the Iraqi people as required.

-- DAVE SCHULER

[R]ight-wing media hacks sound more and more like old guys in bars using tired pickup lines, and nobody sounds more torn and frayed than America's leading bellicose classicist, Victor David Hanson. Hanson & Co. seem to be trapped in their own special psychedelic version of Groundhog Day: everything apparently circles back to some midnight showing of Barbarella that went horribly wrong, and by this point the cliches flow so naturally that columns like this are probably generated automatically by Hoover Institute software before Hanson's name is affixed to them.

-- PAUL CAMPOS

Haven't we reached an odd moment in our history when the burgeoning consensus among the media is that one of Barack Obama's big problems is that he's too good at drawing big crowds? His vulnerability is that he's a charismatic guy who people want to see talk? It's a bit of a perverse perspective.

-- MATTHEW YGLESIAS

Every time McCain opens his mouth it does not "disqualify him from being president." Other, more basic attributes of the candidate are to blame there. And whenever Obama lies through his teeth, or flip flops, or makes outrageous statements that prove he would rather lose a war and win an election than the opposite, it doesn’t mean he’s some anti-American, ignorant, lying wretch. That simply isn't possible given how the press is shortstroking his candidacy. All it means is that the Obama is an overly ambitious, arrogant, supremely overconfident politician with something of a god complex, a royal sense of entitlement that would put Henry VIII to shame, and an anti-democratic belief in his own inevitability (and perhaps invincibility).vmnufm

While McCain should probably be home playing with children (or in the Senate doing the same thing), Obama deserves to be cast into the outer darkness. I've been trying to decide which past American politician he reminds me of the most but have yet to settle on just one. He appears to have Nixon's ruthlessness, Huey Long's megalomania, Aaron Burr's thin skin, and Edwin Summer's penchant for wild exaggerations in his oratory.

-- RICK MORAN