Dave Walker draws cartoons for the UK church paper ‘The Church Times’ and runs Cartoon Church, a site supplying cartoon-based resources for churches to use. He is the writer of ‘the Cartoon Blog‘ and ‘The Dullest Blog in the World’. He lives in Essex, UK.
Simon Owens: You seemed to have created an extremely niche blog by drawing cartoons for churches. Before creating the blog, did you find that there was a large demand for such a thing?
Bob Riven: I started meat-eating leftist as a forum for myself and two other friends, AK and JBC, merely so we can vent to each other about current events, political ideology, and simple self-appeasement. I run a small family farm in upstate New York, in Delaware County, one of the infamous red counties in the Catskill Mountain region. While not exactly a bastion of leftist politics, the county is mostly comprised of dairy farmers who tend to lean towards the libertarian end of the spectrum, making me (and AK who lives about 6 miles away) a very minor Socialist minority.
I grew up in a schizophrenic household. My mother is a devout Christian who makes a big show about her religiosity. My father is a staunch Communist and atheist, who always ridiculed my mother’s faith. Needless to say, my complete mental state to this day is in question thanks to these two and the damage inflicted on my sense of identity. My posts tend to bash organized religion and embrace leftist thinking and approaches towards gaining power for individuals in an increasingly corporate-owned world.
We never meant for the blog to take off in popularity, nor has it yet, so any attention we get, like this interview, is a welcome surprise.
Simon Owens: Which conservative bloggers do you think create the most spin? And if you had to pick a conservative blogger to label a worthy adversary, which blogger would that be?
Simon Owens:Which conservative bloggers do you think create the most spin? And if you had to pick a conservative blogger to label a worthy adversary, which blogger would that be?
Joe W: I don’t really read conservative bloggers too much, but the one I have personal experience with is Michelle Malkin. She actually linked to me a couple of times. The first time was when Michael Moore posted my mosaic of Bush, “War President”, just after Kerry lost in 2004. She tried to co-opt the image by spinning it as pro-Bush. The funny thing was that at that point “War President” was almost a year old and the whole we-rightwingers-view-the-mosaic-as-patriotic meme had played out a long time before among second-tier rightwing blogs and in the comments of the original post — I had even touched on this interpretation in the statement I posted when the shit had started hitting the fan in April of 2004. Malkin, of course, was just commenting on the mosaic because Michael Moore had associated himself with it, implied that she had come up with the pro-Bush interpretation on her own (and, lord knows, maybe she did), and quoted me from the part of my statement that dealt with the ambiguity of the piece’s message. That was pretty surreal. After that the “War President” is pro-Bush meme was resurrected for a little while. It was pretty amazing to watch the ditto-head dynamic in action. The argument Malkin was making was a year old, but just by her expressing it rather than some second-tier blogger it all of a sudden became a belief in some people’s heads…
Simon Owens: Which conservative bloggers do you think create the most spin? And if you had to pick a conservative blogger to label a worthy adversary, which blogger would that be?
Elton Beard:I don’t read too much from the other side any more because of a severe aversion to the word “kerfuffle” but my impression from watching CNN is that the PowerLine crew and Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine are big these days. Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg are still of course the dominant intellectual luminaries on the right, and I hear that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame is as reliable as ever.
For my conservative interlocutor of choice I’ll have to nominate Marc Danziger (AKA Armed Liberal but don’t let that fool you) from Winds of Change who I’ve enjoyed debating in the flesh.
Ed Cone is an opinion columnist with the Greensboro (NC) News & Record, and a senior writer covering business and technology for Ziff Davis Media. He has worked as a contributing editor at Wired, a staff writer at Forbes, and a freelancer in France and North Carolina. His semi-popular blog, EdCone.com, has been published since 2002.
Simon Owens: Which conservative bloggers do you think create the most spin? And if you had to pick a conservative blogger to label a worthy adversary, which blogger would that be?
Edward Cone: There are different flavors of spin, palatable to different (if often overlapping) market segments. To choose a few basic types, there’s the alternate reality of Power Line, where Bush is brilliant and falsehood (e.g. the Schiavo talking points) may be reported as fact; the GOP fealty of Hugh Hewitt; the to-the-ramparts style of Michelle Malkin, who will occasionally criticize Republicans; and the studiously calm voice of Glenn Reynolds, who skews liberal on social issues, blogs about cooking and gadgets, and seems to study all sides of foreign policy issues before ending up in the exact same place.
I hesitate to label any of these folks “adversaries,” because I may agree with them on this issue or that one, and I think the Us vs. Them, cable news style division of American politics into opposing teams is pernicious and often false, but I find Instapundit’s style and content the most formidable.
Simon Owens: Which conservative bloggers do you think create the most spin? And if you had to pick a conservative blogger to label a worthy adversary, which blogger would that be?
Brian Flemming: I used to make a daily habit of reading a few conservative blogs, but I don’t anymore. There’s only so much one can learn from watching people sell out their own principles.
Simon Owens: Which conservative bloggers do you think create the most spin? And if you had to pick a conservative blogger to label a worthy adversary, which blogger would that be?
Angry Bear: All of the conservative bloggers that I read, which is not that many, fall more into the “worthy adversary” category than the “create the most spin” category. I tend to not read the spin-creating conservative bloggers because, well, spin is not informative.
But there are definitely worthy conservative blogs. They’re not really “worthy adversaries” per se, because neither I nor my co-bloggers have an adversarial relationship with any of them. Conservative blogs that I put in this category include http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/ , http://voxbaby.blogspot.com/ , http://janegalt.net/, http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/ , http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/, and Bruce Bartlett — he’s not really a blogger, though).
Bloggasm is a blog run by Simon Owens that focuses on the media, with an emphasis on online media and journalism. It often features interviews with prominent bloggers, authors and journalists. If you want to request an interview, just drop us a line.
simon.bloggasm@gmail.com
