Insult-happy Web guns fall quiet
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ANTONIA ZERBISIAS
The warblog drums are growing silent.
They're either running out of time, or money, or steam — or the conviction that Operation Iraqi Freedom was going to be a cakewalk in the sand.
If the above makes no sense to you, then you have not been paying attention to the chest-thumping chaterati of the cybersphere, a post 9/11 class of might-is-right and right-is-might wordsmiths who rode the "War on terror" wave with their warmongering web logs.
But now, with the news getting more dire, the quag more mired and the cost of war ever higher, the warbloggers find themselves on the wrong side of history. And so some of them are putting down their mice and putting up a white flag.
"Where is everybody?" wailed Damian Penny last week.
The youngish lawyer based in Newfoundland, whose blog (http://www.damianpenny.com) is one of the top right-wing online pit stops for Canadians, noticed that, in recent weeks, his pro-war comrades in keyboards were holding their fire.
"If I may quote (comic Fred) Willard, `wha happen?'" he plaintively asked. "Did everyone else go to a party to which I wasn't invited? This is junior high school all over again ..."
No, the war party is over. There is nothing to celebrate any more. (Not that there ever was.) President George W. Bush's folly is a bloody, costly, tragic, world-dividing disaster that has led to more acts of terrorism by more groups.
Even the New York Times' pro-war Thomas Friedman admits that the U.S. government has blown it, as he wrote last week: "The world is too complex and dangerous for the pious simplicities and arrogant unilateralism of George W. Bush."
Sometimes smart, often sassy and always vitriolic, warbloggers beat the Bush-bashers, slag Muslims and Arabs, attack Canadians and the French for not backing the attack on Iraq and, last but not least, pile on pundits who raised questions about weapons of mass destruction or wondered about exit strategies.
Their favourite targets include the New York Times' Paul Krugman, American foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk, war correspondent for Britain's the Independent.
In fact, both Krugman and Fisk have inspired warbloggers to coin words. "Krugmanism" means to dramatize events to make a point. (As if the right doesn't!) And to be "Fisked" is to be deconstructed by bloggers.
Not that there shouldn't be critics of critics. But many warbloggers resort to dogma, disinformation and personal attacks.
Which is why — indulge me here — I found myself called "blousy,'' a "perpetual outrage machine," "fat AND stupid," a "dumb leftist," "sub-par female impersonator" and "menopause girl" by Canadian bloggeuse Kathy Shaidle (http://www.relapsedcatholic.blogspot.com).
Two weeks ago, she packed it in, at least for a while, after nearly four years of "desperately trying to maintain an increasingly difficult-to-calibrate balance of Righteous Indignation and Smug Superiority to get me through another day of living in this Banana Republic With Snow during wartime."
Other warbloggers, who spend a lot of time talking amongst themselves, have called me "fat Tony" and "the peroxide Wonder" (letitbleed.blogs.com) while others still have labelled me a Nazi, a "Jew hater," anti-American, anti-Semitic and other terms that involve the political tilt of the parts of me that meet my chair.
One guy, whom I found last week after following links from other like-minded mouse warriors, actually imagines that I regularly visit his site (http://www.lobowalk.com, and please, say ``Hi!" from me). He calls me a "dumb slut" — among other things that would probably have my boyfriend, a former Golden Gloves heavyweight, pounding him out.
Witty, most of these warbloggers aren't. Not like some of their heroes, a genuinely brilliant if misguided, if I do say so myself, bunch led by columnist Mark Steyn. (He used to write for the National Post until last year's change of management at the hands of the Asper family.)
Other members of the neocon blogging pantheon include Glenn Reynolds (http://www.instapundit.com), James Lileks (http://www.lileks.com) and Andrew Sullivan (http://www.andrewsullivan.com) — at least until Sullivan felt the anti-gay wrath and hatred of the Bush regime.
Probably the most venomous of all is Charles Johnson. His site (http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com) is the toilet in which all sorts of misinformation and malice about Arabs and, in particular, Palestinians are dumped. Anybody who writes favourably — or even in a half-balanced manner — about them is slimed.
And yet Johnson was recently likened to a "righteous Gentile," a term reserved for Christians who sheltered Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust.
The praise came in a positive profile from B'Sheva, a widely read Israeli publication oriented towards the settler movement.
As a warblogger, Johnson is still going strong, as is the violence in Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Territories.
But those that have fed on it are blogging out.
And so, their drums grow silent.
"There seems to be warblogger fatigue setting in," says popcult blogeratus Marc Weisblott (http://www.radioweisblogg.blogspot.com) who has been tracking the phenomenon. "I think this Iraq debacle is exasperating all of 'em.
"And when your whole schtick is rage against (the New York Times') Maureen Dowd or (the Globe and Mail's) Heather Mallick ... or, uh, you, that's only going to carry one so far."
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