Let me first confess that Glenn Greenwald isn’t my cup of tea. I doubt that admission will ruin his day – somehow I don’t see him having posters of me (available at the Townhall gift shop) decorating his bedroom.

Just to my tastes, he’s a tad ponderous and humorless. Oh, I’ll just come out and say it – he’s a crashing bore. Where reading other progressive bloggers can be a perverse sort of fun, reading Glenn is the virtual equivalent of eating blogged spinach. I bet if I could ever have heart-to-hearts with his fellow progressive blogging luminaries, 80% of them would admit to feeling the same way. Glenn’s a pretentious sort who apparently had his sense of humor amputated as a child.

But Glenn’s not a nitwit. He’s not an imbecile. He’s actually a smart guy. And that’s what drives conservative bloggers crazy. When Glenn botches basic facts and misunderstands simple arguments, stupidity isn’t the absolute defense for him that it is for someone like Oliver Willis.

TODAY, GLENN IS SHRIEKING FOUL because several conservative bloggers, myself prominently among them, quoted comments on the Huffington Post regarding the failed assassination attempt on Dick Cheney. For those of you who don’t feel like following the link, the most prominent sentiment was, “Too bad Cheney survived.”

Glenn’s beef?

Seemingly in unison, they all went digging deep into the comment sections of various liberal blogs, found inappropriate and hateful comments, and then began insisting that these isolated comments proved something… To know what the views are of a particular blogger or "bloggers" generally, one can read those bloggers' words. But stray, anonymous comments prove nothing.

Okay, let’s walk back the cat as they say. My post was about the comments in a particular thread on the Huffington Post. The comments in question weren’t in response to a blog post – they were in response to a news story. No one that I’m aware of imputed the sentiments of the HuffPo’s commenters to any bloggers, either specifically or generally.

The point of my post, and this was quite clear or at least it was clear enough for everyone except Glenn Greenwald, was that the comments I quoted were indicative of the Huffington Post community. I didn’t cherry pick them. They weren’t “isolated.” If you read any of the several blogs that captured screenshots of the HuffPo comment board before Ariana scrubbed it up, they went on in a similar vein for over a dozen pages.

My point was that the Huffington Post community is representative of a certain virulent strand of modern day progressivism. Since the Democratic Party’s biggest wigs actively court the favor of communities like the Huffington Post, I thought this was newsworthy.

In response to all of this, Glenn insisted in a conclusory fashion “that stray anonymous comments prove nothing.” The fact that a prominent progressive online community like the Huffington Post had achieved apparent unanimity over the sentiment that it would have been swell if Dick Cheney were assassinated means nothing to Glenn. Instead, he baselessly insinuated that I was saying certain bloggers owned the comments made at the HuffPo. Even by Glenn’s low standards, this was a clumsy attempt at setting up a strawman. No one suggested any blogger or bloggers supported the Huffington Post comment thread. Rather, the entire point was that the Huffington Post community had collectively jumped the shark.

If Glenn felt like rebutting that assertion, he would have given it a whirl and turned his massive intellect to doing so. But why actually make an argument when erecting a strawman is so much more fun? Glenn ran the blogging equivalent of a pathetic fumblerooski, trying desperately to remove attention from a legitimate and self-inflicted black-eye on the progressive community.

Even by Glenn’s standards, today’s work was a pretty shabby effort.

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