The L.A. Times is starting a fascinating and innovative concept: “wikitorials.” If you are unfamiliar with wikis, and/or what a wikitorial would be, you can read the New York Times article about the concept. The first one is already up. (Via L.A. Observed.) You can go edit it here.

If you do, try to say something constructive. This is something we want to encourage.

Michael Kinsley deserves a lot of credit for this bold experiment in interactivity. Together with the paper’s new blog, I’d like to think the paper is ushering in a new era of communication with its readers. Bloggers need to stand up and recognize what a courageous decision this is for a stodgy old newspaper like The Times.

P.S. I haven’t even had time to read the actual editorial (or wikitorial) itself. I won’t be surprised if it’s the usual knee-jerk nonsense. If so, it really doesn’t matter. The experiment is a great idea.

UPDATE 6-19-05: A commenter notes that the wikitorial has been pulled due to repeated abuse. Such is the life of the Internet . . .

Ginning Up a Coup?

Michael Medved yakked on today’s show about the Democrats’ make-believe mock-impeachment party, and Captain Ed is all over it. They both took the line that this was cute and childish, like a little girl’s tea party for her dolls and teddy bears; but I think it drives deeper than that and is far more disturbing. I think it’s worth really thinking — and worrying — about.

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I said a couple days ago that Time got played when it released the leaked internal account of exactly what we’re doing at Gitmo. I said that people actually support the internment and interrogation of enemy combatants, and I think that’s being proven. Dick Durbin’s criminally stupid accusations are blowing up in his face as he strains to compare “Cold Air Conditioning” and “Zyklon B”. Meanwhile, for a more tangible way to show your support, Ace has the details.

(It’s about time to peel off your “Kick Their Ass and Take Their Gas” sticker anyway.)

UPDATE: Durbin retracts!
UPDATED AGAIN AT TEN: Karol from Alarming News encounters, face to face, a Chicago Way voter while she was petitioning door-to-door on Staten Island:

The woman signed but said ‘I’ve got to tell you, I think this country is really headed in the wrong direction.’ ‘Oh,’ I said ‘you don’t like Bush?’ ‘Oh no, I love Bush, I just think the country has gotten so soft. If what we’re doing in Guantanamo is torture, we’re never going to win the battle against terrorists who cut our peoples’ heads off. They’re going to shame us into losing.’ A standard poll question asks the right direction/wrong direction question and the answer is seen to be a reflection of the president. I wonder how many people feel like this woman and don’t see a poll answer to express it.

Jeff Harrell has blogged and commented here about the Durbin issue and how it is a distraction from the real issues of the day, foreign and domestic. I think this woman’s response reveals a lot about why Durbin and the Moonbats must be met head-on and shown to be the fools they are. Barring new evidence of real torture, these mild interrogations of horrible men at Gitmo are A: necessary and B: nothing to be ashamed of and we need to defend that point against all assaults. The world is watching–not these scribblings, I mean–but the world is watching how the United States will react to this hyperventilating power play. We won’t let them shame us into losing. We can’t.

This is rich. It shows the desperation that some of the “moderates” will engage in to try to smear conservative Republican bloggers.

Background: in a Dean’s World thread, Richard Bennett made this accusation about me:

Like many other self-absorbed tubers and vegetable rights advocates, you’ve claimed that Michael Schiavo abused his wife and actually put her in her coma in the first place by beating her.

That is a lie. I have never made that accusation. I called him on it, noting that he can’t prove that false accusation with a link. If you’re really interested (why would you be?), you can click on the link above and scroll down to see his incredible dishonesty and nastiness.

But Bennett is not the sort to back down just because he’s wrong. So ever since, he has desperately sought evidence that I really made that claim — and he has repeated the libel all over the Internet. He even tried it again the other day here at my site, attempting to leave a comment that said:

Well congratulations for turning the autopsy on its head. It clearly shows that Terri was not an abuse victim (as you claimed) and that she wasn’t capable of the responses to stimuli claimed by her parents toward the end.

Because Bennett is banned here, his comment went into automatic moderation. Since it repeated a lie he has spread about me on comment threads to at least a dozen different blog posts, I didn’t approve it, and it was never published. That’s the background. Now to the fun stuff:

In the comment thread to that John Cole post I linked last night, a commenter relied on the recent Schiavo autopsy report to make this claim:

Michael’s not a wife-beater and Terri wasn’t a bulimic (and all the smart-asses who claimed that her “eating disorder” proved that she didn’t want a feeding tube are, I’m sure, sanctimoniously polluting the comments section of DailyKos as we speak).

I made the observation:

I don’t think the report disproves the idea that she was a bulimic any more than it disproves the idea that Michael Schiavo abused her. In each instance, it simply debunks evidence previously thought by some to support the theory.

Anyone who actually glances at the damn thing can see this is true. The report does much to debunk each of those theories. But no definite conclusion is reached on either issue, despite what you are reading in the media and all over the Web. The main point of my comment was to attack the commenter’s overstatement regarding the report’s conclusions on bulimia. That point favors the perspective of Michael Schiavo supporters. It was a balanced comment, as anyone who reads the whole thing can see.

Yet Richard Bennett has this to say further down the comment thread:

“I don’t think the report disproves the idea that …Michael Schiavo abused [Terri]” – Paprika

There it is.

Yup, there it is: the evidence that you never had, and still don’t. And all you had to do to get that evidence is butcher my quote with an ellipsis to make it sound like the point of my comment was to attack Michael Schiavo. Which it wasn’t.

Hey, Bennett. I heard Maureen Dowd is on vacation. With a nasty, vicious, dishonest Dowdification like that one, you’d be a perfect guest columnist for her.

P.S. Bennett’s comment was posted at 4:18 a.m. this morning. (Note to Bennett: get some sleep!) Yet none of his supporters has yet stepped forward to denounce his dishonest quote-chopping. How about it, fans of Richard Bennett? Why the Silence?