Partisan Blather

In The Washington Post, the typically reliable Howard Kurtz highlights a growing irritant about political punditry: the polarizing partisanship of the so-called opinion-makers.

"The world of opinion now resembles a choose-up-sides playground, with the players rarely straying from their assigned spots," Kurtz writes. "The only real motion is when they jump back and forth between politics and journalism, or demonstrate agility by keeping a foot in both camps.

Indeed, the extremist nature of punditry has made the truly independent-thinking exceptions -- such as Andrew Sullivan or Christopher Hitchens -- all the more of a rare commodity.

Kurtz goes on:

"Although some columnists retain the capacity to surprise, you don't often find Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd or Bob Herbert saying a nice word about Bush on the [New York] Times's op-ed page any more than George Will, Charles Krauthammer and [Robert] Novak had much good to say in The Washington Post about John Kerry. And the cable pugilists -- Donna Brazile vs. Bay Buchanan, National Review's Rich Lowry vs. the Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel -- are booked to ensure constant disagreement."

And so continues the cycle of shrill, contentious partisan hackery. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world ...