Blogging Honesty

I like Matt Singer's blog, Left in the West, and recommend it, but I'm not entirely sure I agree with a couple of points in his post about Domenech:

...As Ben Domenech recently learned, everything you ever wrote can come back to bite you in the ass.

That’s very true.

At least one commenter here thinks that I make myself sound stupid by using profane invective (a great many think I make myself look stupid by using the photo that I do). My response is basically that I don’t care. I started this thing to write honestly. When I can’t do that for whatever reason, I try to not write at all.

And why does writing honestly sometimes require invective? Well, that would be because what happens in this world sometimes causes my blood to boil. I’m not embarassed by that fact.

First, I should point out that I find far more invective in a number of other progressive sites than I do in Matt's site and that doesn't say anything about the truly ridiculous invective one can find on right wing sites (and in general I'm mystified why some media types hold progressives to a higher standard than the right wing blogs). I suppose, on one level, we need more people to speak up who speak honestly and bluntly and who don't care about what others think; Matt does a worthwhile job of it as well as many other progressive bloggers who do likewise most of the time. But when I look around at sites that truly use a fair amount of invective, I'm not sure what it's about or what's being accomplished. And when I look at the comments on some blogs, I have to wonder what's going on.

We're all angry about the things going on in Washington that we are told are being done in our names and there are times we simply have to unload that anger and blogs are a good way to do it. But I'm far more interested in changing things that I am in simply letting my displeasure be known at full volume. And frankly, I'm more in interested in what people have to say after they take a ten-minute walk to cool down before sitting down at the keyboard. Plenty of anger still comes through and that's fine; understated anger is a powerful thing. Something to keep in mind, as just one example, is that when people write letters to the editors or to their representatives in Washington, the letters are filtered and those that are full of invective frequently fail to reach anyone in a position to notice what the trouble is all about. Most of the better bloggers know this and it's partly what they're talking about when they say: be nice.

One last point and this is about the progressive blogging community in general. I'm a little uneasy about the Domenech affair. I read the criticism in the Daily Kos about his plagiarism in his freshman year but I don't think anyone should pretend that he was passing off the news summary printed in his college paper as his own series of news stories; fortunately for the progressive blogs, Domenech did other things that undermined his position with far more certainty. If the clumsy news summary was the only evidence that everybody had against Domenech, I would have been embarrassed to join the chorus. The political battle currently going on in this country at the moment is far more about basic fairness, an idea that right wing conservatives have turned their backs on, than it is about games of gotcha. I think the Washington Post was out of line to hire Domenech but I hesitate to be involved in political justice that simply means an eye for an eye.