Beauchamp, Foer, Erb, Vs Things That Matter

Billy;

Saw your note this morning…. As I stated in my comments we have seen this before.  It’s a typical ploy of Erb and his ilk, once cornered on a factual point to claim “it doesn’t matter. ” Aesop and his fable of the sour grapes seems to roar to mind here.

It seems to me that to take the position he does, suggests that what Erb is really arguing is that people like Foer lying to the American people is inconsequential.  I can’t help but think his position would be as far as possible from his current one, were the lies in question to advantage anything but the lockstep left.

I’d like you to pay particular attention to the comments that I posted to Rick Moran, publicly, last evening.  That bears on our discussion with Erb, in this way: Rick seems to be concerned with the credibility of Bloggers as a group, incidental to what he sees as their “piling on” .  The point that he is neglecting is what would happen incidental to our not responding to such lies. In other words responding to it as Erb would: “It doesn’t matter.”

Clearly, in Rick’s case, Rick thinks it does matter, but he seems overly concerned about how that friction gets handled by bloggers, for fear of credibility losses. (Moran and his writings usually have much to commend them.  In this case, I think they suffer from his being higher up in the stratosphere of Blogdom for too long to see the real sitrep.)
What Rick misses out on, is that bloggers as a whole, are not “pundits”, and they are not “news people”.  (Certainly, there are exceptions.) The people who engaged in the “piling on”, as Rick describes it, are average Americans, just Joe and Jane Lunchbox, who are reacting, I think correctly, to being lied to.  In my view, the larger the numbers of individuals screaming, (Note the wording) the more the perception gets out there, that “hey, perhaps this does matter”.  Which in turn effectively counters the nutty professor and his ilk, and their claims that ‘it doesn’t matter”.

This is, in the end, a matter of perceptions; perception is all. Certainly, perceptions, and the bending of them, were why Beuachamp’s articles were sought and printed in the TNR in the first place.
As an aside, I would further suggest that their not being pundits, and their not being news people, is in addition to their credibility, not a subtraction from it, but then again, that’s just me.