The Art of Conversation Isn't Dead If You're Keeping the Right Company

It's so seldom I get time off from the night shift at the nail salon (those lotion dispensers don't fill themselves) that I like to make the most of it, and on my "night off" earlier this week I seized the opportunity to cowboy up at the bar alongside the goddess duo of the Siren (whose nails, I might add, possess impeccable gloss, really catching the light) and Sheila O'Malley (ditto, also); behind the bar was the legendary Scrib, who, like me, has rugged, frontier hands, like Randolph Scott in just about any Budd Boetticher film you'd care to mention.

Sheila has a lovely account of the evening, and it's true, we did "share" our fascination with the psychopathology of certain rightwing blogs, especially those whose hosts have turned bitter and bristling with recriminations, their blogs resembling Nixon's White House as Watergate unraveled and he started talking to the portraits on the walls. As Sheila observed, around 2003-04 these conservative bloggers were riding high and cocky--they were in post 9/11 vengeance mode, the Republicans had romped in the midterms, and the war in Iraq still had the wind of Victor Davis Hanson at its back. They were quoted in the mainstream press, courted, and leaning into a future that seemed theirs and Karl Rove's--doing victory laps in a seated position, making full circles in their swivel chairs like the novelist Richard Yates at his desk crushing cockroaches with his feet.

But now here they are, still manning the same lemonade stands, passed over or dropped by Pajamas Media, not even under consideration for the Daily Caller's blog slots, their traffic down, their lumbago acting up, embroiled in feuds inexplicable to civilian onlookers, bitching about the paucity of links from alpha bloggers, their comments sections dwindling into daily clubhouse meetings of old-time regulars playing shuffleboard with their hoary opinions and Robert Heinlein quotes.

No wonder they're bitter--their political passions have narrowed into pique and purity tests, and since so few of them have outside interests apart from ogling women's breasts, they spend quality hours filing the fangs of their resentments and rearranging their grudges, nobody's idea of fun.

None of them will be missed once they take their long overdue leave of the stage, but there was one blogger whose name came up, one on our side, whose loss looms larger each season, the great Steve Gilliard.

Turns out we weren't the only ones thinking of him this week. (h/t: Driftglass.)

Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/03/its-so-seldom-im-given.html

Stephen Harper Dennis Hastert Vaclav Havel John Howard Mike Huckabee