Yeah, Joe Rago’s anti-blog outburst was silly, pretentious, and unoriginal. But the first draft was worse. iowahawk has it, in a post titled Blogs Make Me Puke. Here’s a taste:

The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, these filthy, bottom-feeding parasites are like aquatic lice, clinging to the underside of leeches who suck blood from the remora fish who cowardly ride along the belly of this proud, aging shark I call “professional journalism.”

. . . .

Every conceivable — and inconceivable — belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; a cacaphonous miasma of perfunctory langorous bellicosity; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; cascading, tremulous arpeggios of useless prosaicity; complexity and complication are eschewed; directivity and candor and perspicacity belied; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence, which, when one thinks about it, is in itself ironic, creating an infinite, unintended laff-riot loop of ironic non-irony; arguments are totally solipsistic; their obviously drunk and/or crack-addled writers traffic only in pronouncement, and are loathe to employ professional-grade opinion tools like Roget’s Thesaurus, or the dramatic sentence-ending ellipsis . . .

But I think my favorite bit was this:

But because these violent political blogs are predictable, they are also excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, as well as crudely designed novelty T-shirts.

Heh. Read the whole thing.