Here are two interesting pieces on Matthew Klam’s NYT Magazine article about Wonkette’s strawberry-blonde hair and Markos Zuniga’s Freudian guilt over his success; first, from the inimitable James.

I did want to say something about that silly NYT piece about blogging. All I needed to know I learned from the cover. Doing a story on blogging and putting Wonkette on the cover is like using Janine Garafalo to illustrate a story about the power of talk radio. Sure, Limbaugh has better numbers, but what’s more compelling? A story about someone who attracts 20 million uninteresting people, or someone who attracts 100,000 people who are Just Like Us?

This paragraph was amusing:

Earlier this month, a platoon of right-wing bloggers launched a coordinated assault against CBS News and its memos claiming that President Bush got special treatment in the National Guard; within 24 hours, the bloggers’ obsessive study of typefaces in the 1970’s migrated onto Drudge, then onto Fox News and then onto the networks and the front pages of the country’s leading newspapers.

“Coordinated” is a rather lazy choice of words, if the author means “some people sent emails to other people, and they all worked loosely together.” If that’s coordination, then your average freeway, full of people driving alongside and occasionally signaling their turns, is a massive conspiracy. But he didn’t mean that, I don’t think — it was a coordinated assault! Designed to turn our eyes away from the truth the memos implied and make us stare, like Alex in the chair in Clockwork Orange, at the fonts and superscripts and other misleading minutae. It’s amusing to learn that the author interviewed Charles for 45 minutes, and declined to sully his article with any quotes from the fellow who helped disprove the memo. It’s like writing a story about the Enigma decrypts and spending most of your time on a fashion critic who wrote bitchy assessments of the clothing worn by the women who typed in the intel.

In the National Review, David Frum has a different take:

The Democratic political operation of 2004 has not been smart. It has in fact been astonishingly, gaspingly, Guinness Book of Records stupid. It has been simultaneously hysterical and harmless, irate and irrelevant, paranoid and purblind.

The left-wing blogs have to take a considerable share of the blame for this disaster. They were a crucial part of the in-group conversation by which the most partisan Democrats convinced each other that the country feared and hated George W. Bush as much as they did. This delusion — combined with the decision to nominate a man to whom haughty disdain came all too naturally — pushed the Democrats to mistake after mistake and blinded them to opportunity after opportunity.

Matthew Klam’s piece pays little attention to the political consequences of left-wing blogging. He amuses himself instead with a brutal evisceration of the ambitions and delusions of three of the best-known left-wing bloggers in his gunsights: the above-mentioned Marshall, Ann Marie Cox of wonkette.com, and Markos Moulitsas of dailykos.com. Klam deftly portrays Marshall’s obsessive hunting of Great White Whale conspiracies, the grungy ideological fanaticism of the Daily Kos, and the desperately flailing attention-seeking of Wonkette. Klam’s piece cannot make for pleasant reading for any of his subjects. And I suspect that the unpleasantness must have come as quite a shock.