Huffington Post jumps the shark too

While always over the top in its derision of anything Republican, it seems that the bloggers at Huffington Post have gone completely off the planet recently.

Witness this post by Huffington herself. She had appeared on Fox News with Ann Coulter and did not appreciate the way she was treated. (You can link throught to video of the appearance at Arianna's post.) In response, she does a very mature post comparing Ann Coulter to crack addiction for the likes of (conservative journalist) Hannity, including a stupid photoshopped image of what he would look like as a crack addict after a few years. Well, that makes me appreciate your arguments much more, Arianna.

(Incidentally, while she seems to have some notoriety in America, I did not know of her until she started her blog. I also did not know until now that she sounds vaguely like Zsa Zsa Gabor, which means nothing but just made it a little harder for me to take her seriously.)

As for Ann Coulter, (who has recently been disowned by more right-ish bloggers for her referring to Arabs as "ragheads,") she is obviously a deliberate provocateur, and as such she shouldn't be taken too seriously. I tend to find her use of humour pretty sharp, and not unlike PJ O'Rourke in his earlier days. There is a sense of playfulness behind this type of goading of Liberals. Left wing commentators and humourists, on the other hand, seem rooted in sour over- earnestness, and a fundamental assumption of the absolute worst motives behind everything the Republicans do.

However, I have not actually read much of Ann Coulter, and it is quite possible that I would not like her if I did.

Back to Huffington Post. Last week, Peter Daou ran the startling line that in fact the media was running a right leaning bias in its reporting of the Cheney hunting accident. He listed so-called examples and challenged right wing bloggers to counter this with their own examples to show that it was left leaning bias. Apparently the initial response was slow (Daily Kos somewhere noted this too and seemed to take it as a sign of right wing defeat on the issue.)

Of course, the truth was that any even slightly middle-of-the-road person could see that it was a such a ridiculous proposition (and Daou's own examples were so tenuous) that to bother answering it would be like arguing with the insane. Is he unaware of sites like Newsbusters (and many others) which daily list the examples he is seeking?