Blog despair

I was gone for four days attending my sister-in-law's funeral. When I came home and started reading my usual blogs, I realized that I'm always behind the curve. Whatever I think, it's all been thought and written before, and in cases like James Lileks, much more creatively and aptly.

For every Lileks and Instapundit there are hundreds of thousands of us bloggers who just have to comment on the days news, even if guys like Mickey Kaus and Hugh Hewitt have already pretty well nailed it.

Still, out of the vast hoard of commentators out here, some make points in ways that nobody else has. I find blogs especially useful because of the counterspin they provide to the mainstream media. It's the only way to get a fair view of the facts. I don't agree with everything I read, but most bloggers aren't trying to convince me of their objectivity and immunity from questionint their integrity. They also have a lot more angles on the news, since they represent a broader diversity of backgrounds and opinions than the major news dailies and networks. They are in the military, journalism, law, computing, engineering and so on, and their backgrounds give their opinions a persuasiveness that Maureen Dowd will never have. They also give readers a basis for assessment. The idea that Josh Marshal should be trusted to interpret events for us is revealed to be preposterous when one has seen his blog. He is so dedicated to the Democrat Party, that I wouldn't trust him to write obituaries. Yet he and so many like him dominate journalism. That's why we need not only reporters of facts, but a spectrum of analysis to help remove the bias.