Jonah Goldberg, on the NRO website: "...I'm basically burnt out on the smash-mouth stuff. When I criticize younger lefty bloggers for their excesses, I get a lot of "Hello Mr. Kettle, pot's calling on line one" grief. That's all fair to a point. But the basic fact is I don't do that stuff very much any more because it's cliched and boring to me... Simply as a writer, when I see the nasty stuff now, on both the left and the right, my first reaction is to think how easy — and therefore uninteresting — it is. The Edwards bloggers' anti-Catholic diatribes bore me more than they offend me because they are precisely the sort of thing you'd expect to hear from a living cliche who can't imagine the other side might be worth listening too. That's why I harp so much lately on the issue of good faith in writers... I'm more interested in arguments than posturing for your own side. Liberal bloggers like Kevin Drum actually hold open the possibility that the opposition might have a point. The Pandagon crowd is all about cheerleading. Cheerleading has its place, but it's only of use to those who already agree with the cheerleaders... Ramesh once said to me that he wants to grapple with the left's best ideas, not their worst. And while I think it's important to point out how bad the really bad ideas are (and have fun doing it), I think he has the right idea. If the human sacrifice of these bloggers helps move the blogosphere in that direction, it'll be a win for the Republic."
Hear hear. I think making the hatred "boring" is a more promising agenda for change than deploring it. The greatest sin in the blogosphere (and one maybe I am committing here on a routine basis?) is the sin of being boring.