Liberal Media Elite

The New Republic is having a caption contest. The results aren’t pretty.

It was bound to happen… Evidence and voting below:

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After a long while, Battle of the MSM Bloggers is back! After round one, LME presents you with round two: Time’s The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan vs. the Star Tribune’s Katherine Kersten!

I’m going to call this one a draw. What do you think? (Imagine me leaning forward like Barbara Walters or something.)

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So, Time’s blogger Andrew Sullivan is on his usual Christmas vacation this year. Fine, don’t begrudge him that. He needs the rest, and it’s not always relaxing waging a one-man war against the definition of contemporary conservatism and be called a yucky liberal all the time, even though you still probably wear your Reagan ‘84 button on your messenger bag every day. But then I read “10 things I love about America”, written by one of the pinch hitters, Daniel Finkelstein. To give you an example:

1. Loaded potato skins

2. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights

3. Walt Disney

4. The fact that almost everyone you meet in America is incredibly polite

5. The fact that almost everyone you meet in New York isn’t

…

10. The fact that you send your children across the world to risk their lives for liberty and spend billions of your dollars on it, even though the people whose liberty you are saving, including my fellow Europeans, don’t say thank you properly.

Seriously? No, really, I mean… seriously? This reads like a list of things to love about America that American conservatives who don’t have a passport and who haven’t been to New York would imagine a European conservative who lived in America would love about America. The kinds of conservatives like, say, Rush Limbaugh fans. Or at least the ones I know.

Daniel! Put down the David Brooks!

As an American who does have a passport and who has been to New York and who really did grow up in the Heartland and now lives in one of those quaint second-tier cities (never mind for the moment that Minneapolis-St. Paul has over twice the population of Prague), I can fully attest that New Yorkers are, in my experience, more polite and certainly less violent than most anyone else in this country. But only if you stop being all excited that you’re in the “Heartland” and that it’s “authentic” and allow the memories of stupid movies to cloud your prejudices.

And what’s this nonsense about Europeans not saying thank you properly. Until very recently, the United States was given a lot of deference by most European governments. For God’s sake, there are more streets named after Roosevelt and Kennedy on that damn continent than there are in North America. And since when is money, unconditional love and a lifetime supply of Nutella a condition of liberating a people? Do it because it’s the right thing to do, don’t do it because you’re expecting to get laid afterwards. Reserve that sort of attitude for mercenaries.

Oh, this is going to be a long few weeks. Come back soon, Andy.

Presenting an occasional series: BATTLE OF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA BLOGGERS.

I’ve long been of the opinion that mainstream, non-opinion media—newspapers, magazines, TV stations and the like—shouldn’t coax their staff into blogging or hire bloggers. They have too much to lose. Me? I’m a playwright. I have nothing to fear in the form of reprisals from CondéNast. Would that it were so!

So what would it be like if the bloggers who dare not whisper J C Penny’s name got into a fight? Or a popularity contest? That’s what I’ve been pondering all goddamn afternoon. So… Enter Amanda Congdon, ABCNews.com’s new video blogger, who just started this week (I know that because the ABCNews site has been featuring her peeling rack prominently in between Brittney and N-Mal, which is what I’ve decided we all should call the prime minister of Iraq so that he gets more ink).

Then enter Katherine Kersten, the former Center of the American Experiment shill who is a “metro” columnist (if by “metro” you mean “the block where the Taxpayers League eats foie gras out of the hollowed-out skulls of illegal immigrants”) and blogger at Minneapolis’s own StarTribune. Ding!:

Katherine may have the spunk, the drive, the sheer Force of Will in a very Ayn-Randy-Götterdämmerungish way, what with all of the friendly Wagnerian advice and the “Isn’t that a pity that you’re wrong even in the face of conclusive proof that my facts are embarrassingly inaccurate” clucking, but Amanda has the rack, the Web producers willing to exploit her rack and a check from Disney.

So Amanda wins. Back to the drawing board, Gyllenhaal.

Next up: The Star Tribune’s Green Girl vs. Time’s Andrew Sullivan. Or possibly National Review’s Kathryn Jean “K-Lo” Lopez vs. NY Times’s Stanley Fish. See how deliriously happy this can make you? Don’t you wish Dana Milbank had a blog right now?