Great Minds Think Alike?
Marc Cooper on October 22:
“Things have turned so undeniably grim in Iraq that even the President is distancing himself from the President — and he’s not even running for re-election!”
Maureen Dowd on October 25:
“Things have become so dire for the Republicans now even Bush is distancing himself from Bush.”
Bill Moyers
Once said: “All Journalism Is Derivative.”
October 25th, 2006 at 6:16 am
Marc, are you pleading guilty by association?
October 25th, 2006 at 8:00 am
I read somewhere about a study done on blogging that concluded something relevant here: the top-ranked blogs mostly fed off a second tier of more obscure and more specialized bloggers. It sort of blurs the author/editor distinction. It doesn’t surprise me that the foodchain of paper commentary and that of blogging have become coterminous, even overlapping.
You have to admit that Maureen Dowd was a bit pithier. If you’re a few links further up the food chain, you don’t have to say it first, you just have to say it better.
This whole problem of quality being further down the foodchain kinda bugs me, actually.
Over at Brad Delong’s blog, there’s some discussion of the relative paucity of women on the op-ed pages, with a suggestion that we’d be better off with Virginia Postrel over John Tierney, so long as we need to set aside a corner of the page for half-baked libertarianism anyway. The question took me to Postrel’s blog, which took me to some very interesting writing by recent Nobel Laureate economist Edmund Phelps. On Postrel’s blog, you can read her *almost* claiming that she influenced Phelps in his observations about economic dynamism and the importance of institutional arrangements that favor it. I have to admit I’d rather read her than read The Stupidest Man Alive, Donald Luskin of NRO, crowing about how Paul Krugman (rumored to be shortlisted for the Nobel in Economics) *didn’t* get the prize this year, while the somewhat more libertarian Phelps did. (Can you imagine? Saying, I’m right that Krugman is a crap economist because he didn’t quite get the Nobel Prize in Economics *this* time? What planet does he live on?)
However, neither Postrel nor Luskin could be too happy to see Phelps approvingly quoting Amartya Sen. Nor are they too likely to take note that Phelps is at an ivory tower outfit run by that do-gooder Jeffrey Sachs, almost drowning in liberals. But in a way, none of that matters at their level. They can gloss over it. More people are going to read Luskin and Postrel than Edmund Phelps or Amartya Sen, even though both of those economists can write better for a general audience than either of these two admirers of theirs, even if all they had to work with was a moldy quill, some rat’s blood for ink, writing on wet toilet paper in a dank prison cell.
October 25th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Don’t get me started on “Nobel” Prize in Economics. It really a prize by the Swedish Central Bank and given the cachet of “Nobel” to make it seem respectable. It is a joke given awards willy nilly to the flavor of the year. More like the Lit prize that everyone shakes their head at.
Maureen Dowd is, of course, one of the reasons we have Shrub. Her snarky comments about Gore helped to sink a grownup in 2000 and now she wants to atone. Sorry Babe, why not write about something you know. Like Makeup and Hair!
October 25th, 2006 at 11:09 am
I’m assuming that your suggestion that Maureen Dowd is a great mind was ironic. She has been the most disposable, shallow columnist at the NYTimes – which unfortunately has been a relatively competitive position. She lost that honor, of course, when David Brooks showed up. (Bob Herbert isn’t in the running because I don’t believe that anyone has actually ever finished reading one of his columns.)
October 25th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
I wouldn’t know Reg as I have seen no reason to shell out money for “TIMES Select.”
October 25th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
When I plowed through todays NYT and got to the op-ed section I saw Mo-Do’s column and thought: She’s at the back of the classroom, passing notes back and forth with Mr. Coop.
Be careful with the spit-balls.
October 25th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Great Mimes Act Alike, as well.
October 25th, 2006 at 4:32 pm
What reg said. bullseye! and I say that as a paid up Times Select man…
October 25th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
“Great Minds Think Alike?”
Uh, no. Neither you nor Dowd are great minds.
October 26th, 2006 at 8:45 am
The Nobel in Economics is not really a Nobel Prize? Hardly a dime’s worth of difference, rlc:
http://tinyurl.com/7q7ev