Everyone’s favorite Aunt B. did a great job summing up the Liberal Blogger Afternoon on the Hill at Tiny Cat Pants and at Pith. She fails to mention, however, the great restraint both she and I exercised in not racing one another on some of the wheeled desk chairs stored openly in a hallway across the way from the press room – which looks like pretty much every newsroom I’ve ever been in and made me more than a little nostalgic for times gone by.
Also, I didn’t hear what Rep. Odom said. I was too busy politely squabbling with the LeftWingCracker over who should take the last remaining seat. He said, “You’re a lady,” and I said, “You’re older than I am,” and then there was a kind of “Oooooo” noise out of the peanut gallery, as if facts were fighting words. The Cracker acquiesced and took the seat, which must have been when Rep. Odom said that bloggers appeared to be as hard on each other as we are on politicians.
Sir, I beg to differ. In the last six weeks alone I’ve called politicians “jackasses,” and accused them of being lazy and cowardly and out of touch.
And I photoshopped Rep. Casada’s face onto a painting of Marie Antoinette.
Just because I always crack up at this.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m tougher on politicians than I am on the Cracker.
So many legislators took time out of their day – moments between meetings or before session – to come by and say hello to us. Bloggers are strange creatures: not quite media, louder and more persistent than the average constituent, usually writing as a labor of love from varied backgrounds. Meanwhile, print and broadcast journalism are evolving and, for the most part, reporters don’t have beats anymore. What filters out of the Capitol does so in new and different ways, through new and different people, and it would be easy to be defensive toward and distrustful of political bloggers. Instead, I walked away with the impression that, as B. said, at least the Democratic legislators we met with “now have a sense of the online world as more than just a place where kooks gather to complain about them.”
Although, it is sort of still that, too.