The "liberal" Washington Post has a bizarre hit piece on lefty blogs today that seems straight out of the "Dean Scream" school.

It all starts with the photo:



and gets better in the copy:



Get it? Lefty bloggers are borderline insane people so consumed with rage that they ignore their kids and sit around at their computers all day, faces contorted with unending hate, composing profanity-laced, barely grammatical screeds. (And probably twisted by childhood trauma for good measure, as the piece makes sure to talk at length about O'Connor's father getting killed in Vietnam before she was born.) Because, you know, you can't oppose the administration without being stupid, crazy or both.

Michelle Malkin must be beside herself with glee this morning.

Pardon me if this is obvious, but you can cherry-pick comments from any semi-popular blog or message forum to prove that the inhabitants are deranged. (Except this one, of course. We aren't even semi-popular, and all our posters and commenters are intelligent, reasonable and unusually attractive.) The Post doesn't care about the impassioned, provocative writing at Whiskey Bar or the expert commentary at Unclaimed Territory or the unending parade of incriminating evidence at Crook and Liars. No, they primly gasp in shock as they point at The Rude Pundit, totally missing the whole point of his blog (or the idea that the Internet is big enough to contain all different styles of commentary). They grab comments from the baying mob over at Eschaton -- gosh, the Internet is full of hasty, angry message postings? Who knew?

And all this is portrayed as somehow confined to the left. Where's the blockbuster expose of the genocidal racism of Little Green Footballs? The fact-free bizarro world of WorldNetDaily? They're probably too busy trawling those places for the next Ben Domenech.

More importantly, how can I get distorted by the WaPo? I need the hits.

UPDATE: Here's how Maryscott O'Connor would rather we see her:



I like the fact that it's on the Fox News set.

Her side of the story is on her blog (linked above).

After reading a bit over there, it struck me how much the writer missed the "gallows humor" aspect of so much of the "angry" commentary he talked about. The fact that he never read a blog before starting on the piece says volumes. It's sort of like someone who's never heard rap before writing a big article on it and never getting past the fact that there's no melody.