This has happened to me more than few times, but it still kind of floors me when I’m searching on Google or visiting a site for information on some topic and end up running across someone in turn citing something I’ve written.
Back in May, for example, I caught journalist Robert Scheer in a little lie about the Bush administration’s policies toward Afghanistan. I actually took time to rewrite the article and pitched it to a number of right wing sites I thought might find the topic interesting, but back in May the response was basically “Afghani-where?”
Suddenly, though, everyone’s interested in Afghanistan and the folks at SpinSanity expanded on my highlights of the problem with Scheer’s reporting and ran with it back in June. I had no idea anyone cared until I ran across a link to a SpinSanity story on the FrontPageMag site. (The weird thing, by the way, is that Scheer still bizarrely maintains that aid relief given to the UN to prevent starvation in Afghanistan represented a “signal” to the Taliban that the U.S. supports its sheltering of bin Laden).
The moral of the story is not that everybody should read my sites (though, obviously, they should), but rather that small, independent web sites run by critical thinkers really are fulfilling the promise of the Internet, despite all the carping about how Time Warner and other large media conglomerates now dominate.
Look at SpinSanity — basically two guys with a web sites and some very sharp minds skewering the excessive spin that is so common on both the Left and Right these days. That’s my kind of web site.