Warping the View

Little battles between bloggers erupt on a regular basis in the Virginia political blogosphere. Some of them seem spontaneous, others more contrived. Many of them come off as a promotion for one or more of the parties. Nearly all of them end up looking silly. Most of the time I try to ignore them.

At SLANTblog and at the community blog that I publish, the Fan District Hub, I often write about politics. Occasionally, I write about the political blogosphere.

Last week, after spending a little time looking at the posts of some of Virginia’s rightwing bloggers I reacted with a piece here at SLANTblog on how comically ineffective some of their regular putdowns are. The piece cited such juvenile jabs as: “Marky Mark” for Mark Warner; “Governor Timmy” for Tim Kaine; “Democrat(icks)” for Democrats. Later I edited the piece down, to make it more locally oriented, and posted a second version of it at Fan District Hub.

Both versions laughed at the notion that such lowbrow commentary is accomplishing anything close to making undecided or independent voters rethink their views of Warner, Kaine, or Democrats, in general. Both versions used the example of how one such blogger liked to brag about his “influence” ranking, according to Blognet News (a statewide political blog aggregator), while his blog stands as the least popular (then 215th out of 215) of all blogs at RVABlogs (a Richmond blog aggregator).

That observation underlined the difference between a political-blogs-only aggregator and an aggregator that pulls from a locality’s wide array of bloggers, many of them non-political. Yes, it seems some political bloggers are not so popular or influential with a general audience. That should hardly come as a surprise, given the strident nature of many political bloggers on either side of the aisle between red-think and blue-think.

Since then the publisher of the decidedly rightwing The Ward View has taken exception to what I wrote, even though I did not name him or link to his blog. My main point was to ridicule some of the silly tactics of a few prolific rightwing bloggers who aren’t influencing anyone outside of their own blogging team. I didn’t seek to call anyone in particular out, so I didn’t name any other blog, either.

That’s precisely why I didn’t write that The Ward View was the blog rated least popular at RVABlogs. Since then The Ward View has outed itself with two posts; here and here.

At The Ward View its publisher claimed he doesn’t read my blogs.

As we noted before, we wouldn’t have discovered this if WordPress hadn’t shown a link from the blog in question. We don’t read either of the blogs where the article was posted. However, that link has been removed and the existence thereof denied.

Well, I don’t know what his point was with that business about a link, but it is not true. Neither of my previous posts mentioned or linked to The Ward View. So, no such link has been removed. One is left only to speculate as to why this blogger has chosen to make that up out of thin air. But it certainly is revealing.

And, given what I’ve seen of how these tiffs in the blogosphere go, this odd but outright prevarication will not cause The Ward View much of a problem with his fellow rightwing bloggers, members of his club/team who shall remain unnamed.

For some in Virginia's political blogosphere an opportunity for self-promotion trumps honesty every time.