Do Your Own F’ing Research

They are no longer online, but back in the day (i.e. 1999-2004 or so), I ran several blogs that I updated on a regular basis and were quite popular with a rather conservative audience, even though I am definitely not a conservative. I got bored after I got to the point where I was getting a million or so page views a month and it was becoming too much of a job. After I switched CMSes a few years ago, I didn’t even bother to migrate them.

Anyway, I’m doing some ego surfing the other day and I realize that something I wrote on one of those now-defunct blogs was mentioned in a book written by a popular conservative blogger whom I consider to be a racist and am not going to mention.

So I pull up the relevant page in Google and am dismayed but not surprised. The conservative blogger is quoting someone, and he’s using some blog entry I wrote years ago as the reference for the quote.

Honestly, I will never understand that sort of idiocy. If I were going to write a book and wanted to use the same quote, I would feel obligated to track down the original source. I could have been insane that day and simply made the quote up. I could have misquoted the speaker. My CMS could have partially mangled the quote to one that appears much worse than the original.

Anything could have happened, which is why you fucking track down the original if you’re going to include it in your goddamn book.

One of the biggest misjudgments I made after 9/11 was taking seriously the case that conservative bloggers made against the mainstream media.

As Ken Layne put it, “It’s 2001, and we can Fact Check your ass.” That was good as far as it went, but what many conservatives seemed to mean–based on their subsequent behavior–was, “We’re going to fact check everyone except ourselves.”

You see that today in the circle jerk of links among conservative blogs that reinforce groupthink but often have little in the way of fact checking or critical thought.

Meet the new Dan Rather…same as the old Dan Rather.