@deepomega There should be a "Deepomega Reacting to the Hack List" video on Youtube. Kinda like those "So and So Reacting to Two Girls One Cup" videos, except replace "revulsion" with "indignation." I'd watch!

@boyofdestiny Wake me when we get to the plausible defense of David Brooks. Or the end of the world. Whichever comes first.

@dntsqzthchrmn David Brooks is an asshole, but he has been an asshole for HUNDREDS OF YEARS. It's like Huffington Post releasing an annual slideshow of the world's tallest mountains.

@deepomega Except that the mountains' employers aren't very likely to remember the Huffington Post come the annual employee review.

@deepomega Mountains, In order. Everest, Kilimanjaro, Denali, Baker, Hood, Shasta, Rainier.

@dntsqzthchrmn Do you seriously believe the intended purpose of this is showing up on Wolf Blitzer's performance review? "I'm sorry, Wolf, we'd love to give you a bonus but Alex Pareene called you a shithead." What?

@deepomega No, I don't seriously believe that, just as you don't seriously believe your comparison of a mountain list to a hack list. But these inside spitball things do have a way of piling up into a general impression.

@dntsqzthchrmn I don't see how anyone could argue that David Brooks' "general impression" is anything other than what Pareene alleges – but he is popular, for some reason, and he is not going anywhere. What this ACTUALLY is, though, is an annual reason for Pareene to get spleeny and angry at inside baseball bullshit. He can go full on Daily Kos diarist – nobody who disagrees with him will care what he says, and it won't do anything but rile up the left base. It's the Ann Coulter playbook, and I'm not gonna back him on it just because we hate the same people.

@deepomega Point taken.

@deepomega You're not wrong. But I think if there's any importance to what Alex Pareene is doing, it's not in the insulting of media figureheads (because it's true, he's preaching to his own choir, and it would take a lot more than than him and his cohorts to unseat a guy like David Brooks from his seat of influence over David Brooks's own choir), but rather in the insulting of the attitudes and practices that make these media figureheads so odious: the fealty to "objectivity," the fetishization of centrism and moderation as undeniably good, the idea that a lack of civility is the root of our problems, yada yada yada. His soapbox is relatively small, and his audience doesn't really need to be more persuaded than they already are. I wish he were writing this in the Washington Post or the New York Times. He isn't, but still, I'd rather have this kind of commentary out there than not.