Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Strong "Barking Moonbats" candidate

The hosts over at Terrorism News have terrific inside position on the road to being the first official Barking Moonbats (etc.) link. I encountered the site while exploring eBlogger over the last couple of weeks. From the title, I took it to be a site that consolidated reports on terrorist activities; collecting news stories and linking them--that sort of thing. Over the last few days I hit the site again (while doing another random run-through) and found an entry titled "The Top Ten Power Brokers of the Religious Right" which included the opening part of that story, with the teaser lead "Who they are, what they want, and why these American ayatollahs must be stopped." Now, the occurrence of such a story on a site that is titled in such a way that an expectation of terrorism stories is fostered intrigued me, I admit. I decided to have a look at the story, and (as expected) it didn't have anything much to do with terrorism. I saw that some comments had been made (three at the time, as I recall, but 16 at the moment), so I decided to have a look. Some lass* with the nick "betmo" had kind of a cheerleader comment (positive), and then a guy going by "Frank" made a comment expressing his disappointment with the inclusion of the story. Frank said that the story illustrated the bias at the site, and added that he would not be able to take the site seriously as a result (he said a bit more, but I intend to obtain permission to quote liberally from those comments before offering more detailed commentary). The ensuing comments were hilarious, and they constitute the strongest bid yet for placing a site in the unused sidebar category previously mentioned.
I added a comment of my own, which was apparently deemed off-topic (though all three of my comments remain in the column as of this writing).
The most perplexing line of argumentation employed by the hosts is DJEB's challenge that I read a book on argumentation to see that he is not guilty of "copyright infringement."
I hadn't been aware that copyright infringement had been at issue.

The commentary thread alone promises to give me a solid week's worth of posting material (though the current week promises to limit my posting activities).
Making my comments here makes a great deal of sense because they simultaneously criticize me for not staying on the topic of the original story and for not answering their criticisms of my posts to the commentary thread.

*Thanks to "H" at Terrorism News for providing gender information on "betmo."

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