As I write these opening words, it’s a little after 2 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, October 17. I mention this by way of setting up a whiny rant about how hard it is for a new blogger to get noticed.
There’s an editorial [free link] titled “A Liberal Supermajority” in today’s WSJ [today’s!! I’m on top of this!!] providing what may be the most deeply-informed, tightly-argued description of the consequences of an Obama victory. Marshalling fact after fact, deploying beautiful, lean, unfussy prose, the editorial explains why such a sweeping Democratic victory would do grave and lasting damage to the Republic.
How do I know this? Oh, I read about it in a blog post in The Corner by former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, who now is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. [He actually wrote the eloquent words that make up the meat of the prior paragraph — I used his words without quote marks to make a point, but I’m disclosing the deception in the same post. If I were Catholic, that would be one Hail Mary, one Our Father.] Mr. Robinson’s description was posted less than half an hour [half an hour!!] before I started writing.
Pete [Hey, we’ve never met, but can I call you Pete? I could have written, “Pete Robinson nails it when he describes today’s WSJ editorial,” pretending like we’re BFFs and all, but with my luck it would turn out that your REAL friends call you Peter.] Let me switch to third-person and start again.
Mr. Robinson, who turns out to have been born just one year before me [so maybe it WOULDN’T be unthinkable that I could call him Pete some day!! Unless he goes by Peter] , is a person of substance — beyond just the long-ago credential of having written speeches for President Reagan. [Hey, *I* wrote speeches for a President, too!! OK, I wrote speeches for Dan Tully, who in the 1990s was President (later Chairman) and CEO of a once-iconic securities firm that is being swallowed up by Bank of America. But dammit, he WAS a President.] Seriously, he’s worth listening to — I’ve watched several of Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge interview segments. They’re quite good, and he has a knack for setting up commentary in an evocative way.
So when Pete told me [OK, I read it in The Corner — this interior dialogue is in danger of becoming tedious] that this is a Pulitzer-worthy editorial, I knew I had to read it right away. Right after I knock out this “quick” blog post. [Damn, I hope it really is a good editorial… otherwise I’m going to look silly.] Maybe THIS will be the blog post that gets me my first InstaLaunch! [Google it your own damn self.]
Uh oh… it just dawned on me that if Mr. Robinson has had time to write an evocative post for The Corner, other bloggers may also have seen the editorial, and have sucked all of the oxygen out of the blogosphere already. Let me get one of my 20-something assistants to do a little research. [Oops, the assistants were on standby back when I worked for a New York PR agency — they commanded salaries in the “mid-five-figures,” (in NYC!!) far more than I can pay now, even in Jersey.] OK, I’ll do my own research.
It turns out that when I started writing this at 2:09 p.m. [the lying Blogger timestamp, below, uselessly records when you start typing, not when you post], there were 93 blog posts about “A Liberal Supermajority”. [There will be more by now if you follow this link.] And, there were more than 400 moderated comments on the WSJ article itself, a number that also will have grown by the time you follow this link. [The WSJ comments app is not paging properly, but there are 14 comments on a page, and there were 29 pages when I checked — do the math if you think I might be winging it. “Moderated,” BTW, means that a person in NYC making mid-five-figures has glanced at each and every comment to make sure it doesn’t misspell “fuck” in a headline. Sorry for dropping the f-bomb without warning in a previously PG-rated blog, but it evokes an old copy desk saying I made up more than 20 years ago while I was on a copy desk, and it would lose verisimilitude [look it up] if I went with f***.] So it looks like my 15 hits of blogger fame will have to wait for another day.
Time to wrap this up. [I can hear you now, mocking me… “wassamatta, Kirk, you’ve got all this time to blog because things are a little slow with your consulting business?” Hm… Are you asking that because I might be able to help your company or organization meet your communications needs?] Besides, it’s almost time for dinner — right after I read the WSJ editorial.