My email and voicemail were full of reactions to today’s Raleigh News & Observer’s profile of me by Sadia Latifi, “Blogger gets respect: Durham resident writes on progressive issues.” It’s a good look at my blog, with quite a bit of personal background that people may not know about me—my father’s side of the family has deep roots in Durham’s political history, and the reporter gave a good summary of it.

Actually, I didn’t think most of the information I gave to Ms. Latifi would make it into the article. You know, you sit down with the reporter for a couple of hours and figure they’ll pick a few quotes here and there and it will end up a little squib somewhere in the back of the paper, but it’s a full-blown feature piece…with photos (argh!). But at least it gives non-bloggers a peek into my world. I have no idea what you all think, so I’m putting a post up for your reactions (both to the article and the info in it) because you don’t see much coverage about bloggers in the MSM.  Most of the time they try to make lefty bloggers look uncouth and insane. At least I escaped that trap. I had my sanity hat on the day I was interviewed.

It’s pretty amusing that more people in the political world in DC know me because of my political blogging than people in my own state.

I can’t help it.  I’m addicted to reading the Abstinence Clearinghouse blog.  It’s like reading a label of Dr. Bronner’s soap, but even weirder and more perplexing.  What I can’t figure out is how the bloggers have survived this long with their high levels of intelligence, when there is so much traffic to wander into or electrical sockets to experimentally poke with forks.

Some recent wisdom culled from the AC blog:

This was recently seen on a billboard, “Sex can wait till marriage.  Will you?”  Think about it.

That’s from the blogger with the best name ever on an anti-sex blog: HotMama247.  She might be my favorite of the bloggers, because everything she writes is like this.  You know, deep.  You can practically hear the bong water bubbling as she rewards herself for the hard work coming up with these brilliant insights.  The other blogger anonymous is also fond of beating you into submission with inanity disguised as insight, with comments like:

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One of the worst problems in American politics is that once a wingnut myth takes off, it never dies, no matter how much evidence you can marshal against it.  There are people who will go to their graves believing that there was a good reason to think that Saddam Hussein was hiding WMDs as part of his plot to re-blow-up the World Trade Center after he personally crashed a plane into it the first time.  Or, as a less hyperbolic but still baffling example, my dentist told me a couple of weeks ago that she still, in the year 2008, has to talk down patients who are in a full blown panic about fluoridated drinking water. 

Which is why the second I heard the words “pregnancy pact” on the TV, I realized two things at once: a) there was no fucking way and b) no matter how much evidence you marshaled to prove that there was no fucking way, wingnuts would believe that gangs of teenage girls are roaming the countryside, sucking up sperm from hapless men with their succubi cunts of doom in order to get their hands on that diamond-jewelry-buying welfare cash.  The fact that the movie “Juno” was blamed was just an added bonus, and evidence that teaching women such as screenwriter Diablo Cody to read and write was the first step on the road to teenage sluttitude hell. 

Well, here’s the no fucking way part: Turns out the principal, in his desperation to prove the nay-sayers that suggest that making contraception available to teenagers might help them contracept, made up the pregnancy pact.  His main source was, contrary to his initial claims, not the school nurses’ office, but the gossip in the school hallways, which as we all recall has an accuracy rate nearing utter perfection. 

Okay, so school gossip isn’t accurate, but my grasp on what legends will never die seems to be hitting it out of the park—-after recovering slightly from being proven fools once again, the Wingnutteria is coming back with, “So what if the pregnancy pact wasn’t true?  Let’s believe it is anyway, because it’s politically useful for denying girls access to contraception.”  “Fuck reality, we’ll believe what we want to!” has been working for a long time with wingnuts, on everything from the War on Terra to global warming, so there’s no reason for them not to resort to that tactic here. 

Moloney starts off by breathlessly recounting stories of succubi teenagers, before hastily admitting and then dismissing the fact that the entire premise of his outraged article (the pregnancy pact) is bullshit. 

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I just want to write a quick post about the issue of “silence” arguments—-i.e., the “why aren’t group A writing more about topic B?” posts.  It’s similar to the “you can’t prove a negative” fallacy.  All too often, when we get angry with someone for not blogging a specific news item, it’s not that they don’t care, but something more mundane.  They were napping when it came out and missed it in their news reader.  They don’t feel they have anything useful to add to the discussion, and think someone else blogged about it more eloquently.  They cover similar topics so often that they occasionally skip a news item on the topic lest they come across as shrill, one-note bloggers.  There’s only so many hours in a day, and even the most devoted bloggers spend some of those napping, earning money, or keeping their marriages together.  And of course, at least 50% of the time someone is accused of ignoring an issue or story, they actually blogged it and the complainer is ignoring that or conveniently missed that to make a point. 

For me, the number one determinant on whether or not I blog a news item is whether or not I have anything entertaining or useful to say on the topic.  If you really feel strongly that I have an obligation to blog about X, Y, or Z, and I don’t, please consider that I might not be all-powerful and have witty, intelligent things to say on everything. 

I say this because I read Kathy G’s post about the feminist silence about attacks on Michelle Obama with guilt, because I don’t think I’ve blogged any furious, “Shut up you monsters!” posts about the attacks on Michelle Obama.  But the damning “silence” language makes it sound, in my case at least, a lot more nefarious than it really is.*  It’s not that I don’t care.  I miss a lot of dust-ups (like this one), and honestly I don’t think I would have anything useful to say about it even if I hadn’t.

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