Hillary, the Greatest Satan

What's the point of blogging - personal fulfillment, ego gratification, watching the patterns of your thoughts emerge in writing, so you can see yourself more clearly? And do you really need other people for that?

Since blogging is a new enterprise for me, I've been checking out other blogs to see what kind of conversations people are having. Mostly I've found communities of like-minded people saying things like, "Doesn't the New York Times suck?" and "Doesn't Hillary Clinton just scare you to death?" And their respondents generally answer in the affirmative. Yes, yes, yes, you're so right. And all those people who think the other way, they're just crazy. (That's at the right-of-center blogs, of course, where I've been spending the most time. The left-of-center bloggers are similarly outraged, I'm assuming, but in the opposite direction.) Depressing, most of it, and utterly predictable.

One of the reasons I'm blogging is to actually try to figure out why people think they way they do. If Hillary Clinton is scary, surely there's some reason you think so (beyond mere pathological hatred). If the New York Times reporters are taking bong hits while they're writing their stories, surely you can document some actual instance of egregious error or reasonable-person bias (again, beyond mere disgust that somebody is saying something you don't like).

(By the way, I'm neither here nor there on Hillary Clinton at the moment. It's summertime, for God's sake! Eventually, I'll get palpitations over the election, but not now. I may live in New Hampshire, but I'm not going to start this whole stressful cycle again for the sake of ... why are we doing this primary thing so early, again?)

My favorite political-oriented blog so far is "AmbivaBlog," because - guess what - it's strangely open-minded, neither left nor right, asking questions instead of simply answering them. I like that. It's a refreshing ideal: a bunch of people trying to figure out things together, rather than just despising the other side in tandem. Too sanctimonious? Well, that's a liberal failing, I've heard.