News-Leader Gives Us Blogs We Don't Need --Really Conservative Vs. Pretty Conservative

Yet another illustration of the myth of the so-called liberal media...

Via John Combest today I learned, to my great disgust, that the Springfield News-Leader has cobbled together a couple new blogs that appear in its online edition.  One of the blogs, called "Ozarks Right," is a conservative tilted blog with much of the material authored by semi-literate blogger Paul Seale.  It is, much as one would expect, a repository of insanity that reaches impressive levels of unintentional humor. 

But that isn't nearly as depressing and wrong as the News-Leader's counterpart blog, which it calls, deceivingly, "Ozarks Left."  Purportedly a liberal-leaning blog, Ozarks Left is really --in the most generous possible assessment-- a collection of middle of the roaders whose postings do at least as much damage to the progressive cause as the posts on the "Ozarks Right" blog.  

­ Consider that, at the time of this post, two of the most recent three blogposts on "Ozarks Left" were aimed squarely at reinforcing some very nasty right-wing themes.  They are the sorts of ideas that more properly belong on the blogs of conservatives or crypto-fascists.

One of the posts, by a fellow named Jim Lee, is a bizarre mash-up of a "Hardy Boys" elementary school detective story with the modern day issue of state-sponsored torture by the United States.  Lee's intended point is more or less inscrutable, but regardless of his intent Lee's post serves mainly to minimize the abject horror and revulsion that those of us on the "left" feel about the topic of waterboarding.  The title of his post "Why Waterboarding Isn't Torture," is as unambiguous a summation of an anti-progressive view as one can imagine.  Yet it appears on the News-Leader's "Ozarks Left" blog.  Nice.

Even worse is the post immediately following Lee's, written by a woman in a funny hat named Sheila Noblitt.  In the post, Noblitt beams about the idea of people attacking likely Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, suggesting oddly that her supporters are "Republican wolves in sheep's clothing," and citing the oft-disproven folk wisdom that Hillary just can't beat any of the potential Republican nominees.  Noblitt goes onto to mention that she feels it's critical that a Democrat win the presidency in 2008, but that she will in no circumstances vote for Hillary Clinton.  How very "left" of her.  Did I hear someone mention Republican wolves in sheep's clothing? 

Blogs are blogs and people can post whatever crazy non-sequiturs and GOP spin points they like best.  I get that.  But what we ought not allow is for mainstream media to shift the playing field in favor of conservatives by publishing warmed-over moderate and regressive spin points and suggesting that they are the work of "the left." 

The News-Leader should go ahead and have blogs called "Ozarks Right" and "Ozarks Right-of-Center" if the only bloggers they can find are ones who are willing to espouse views in that spectrum.  That'd be both much more fair and considerably more accurate than the "Right vs. Left" charade that they've got going on at present.