Megan McArdle

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I have a little list . . .

16 Apr 2008 09:28 am

Apparently I've made Roy Edroso's hate list. Honestly, I feel like he could have done better. My friends offer more biting and incisive criticisms. Even when sober. But of course, it's an honor just to be nominated.

Comments (28)

Granted, but the phrase "Lipstick Libertarian" is golden.

Oh Please.

Roy Edroso does snark better than ANYONE.

Megan McArdle

Lipstick libertarian? WTF?

Stupid/evil ratio of 60/40. Should you be proud? Or should you fit yourself with a helmet like David Cross in that episode of "Just Shoot Me" so you don't accidentally hurt yourself?

/obscure?

Roy does a much better job of portraying you than Tom Tomorrow does.

He got the stupid/evil ratio completely wrong. After Megan went for the bait laid out by Jeff Greenwald and defended the MSM, it was proven that Megan is the stupidest blogger on the planet.

I think it says a lot about the state of left wing thought when someone who disagrees with you must be stupid or evil.

Paul Brinkley

Bragan: your link goes to the snark piece on her, but the picture is of Glenn Reynolds, which adorns all of those pages.

If you want to see Tom Tomorrow's rendition of Megan:

http://www.villagevoice.com/gallery/0816,0816bloggers,411906,3.html?pic=5&total=10

(Althouse is there too!)

JoshK: It's pretty obvious that Edroso is speaking only to his audience. You know, a San Francisco fundraiser.

To be fair, the right has plenty of its own curmudgeons. I'd condemn them more often myself, too... if I actually read them.

Megan,

You definitely stand out in that crowd in the "one of these people doesn't belong" kind of way. For some reason Roy just has a real bug up his ass about you, and always has.

And I say that as someone who thinks that you do often display a tendency to miss the forest for the trees. But whatever your faults and virtues, you don't belong with that particular group of crazies.

I thought it was a pretty good article, with pretty accurate takes on the bloggers. However, unlike the author, I thought the descriptions showed bloggers worth reading.

Dhalgren -- Yes, Megan's stupid to evil ratio should be increased, but surely she's not nearly as stupid as Jonah, Althouse and Ace of Spades.

JoshK's comment also has merit in that the binary stupid:evil ratio is too reductive. I propose a Good:Bad:Ugly:Banal scheme. Megan's revised score 15:20:40:25. (In the Sergio Leon sense, Bad = Evil/cruel and Ugly = stupid and repulsive. An example of "Bad" would be defending the MSM re: their poor Yoo coverage. Saying that protesters should be beaten = Bad.)

Stupid = Not previewing comment.

(In the Sergio Leon sense, Bad = Evil/cruel and Ugly = stupid and repulsive. An example of "Ugly" would be defending the MSM re: their poor Yoo coverage. Saying that protesters should be beaten = "Bad.")

Like so many people who try to be clever, the author simply seems rude and unfunny. However, in a general sense I can see where he's coming from. I have often been annoyed with some of your takes on issues and been frustrated by the illogic. That being said, I am sure that if I had a blog the same could be said about me. It's the problem with posting 5-10 things a day, there will be inconsistancies.

I do love how you get slammed for admitting that you were wrong about the war. I find that amusing.

Also, I think that we should get over this the [party I am not affiliated with]'s comentators are very mean to the [party I am affiliated with] crap. Both sides talk smack about both sides. Trust me, the stuff conservatives say about liberals is just as crappy as the stuff liberals say about conservatives.

Don't worry, it isn't like you're getting trashed in the section of the Voice that anyone in New York reads.

Now, when they start talking shit about you in the "Anything Goes" section, that's when it is time to worry.

Read the whole sentence, Kate:

Eventually abandoned her previous affection for the Iraq War while complaining that the war’s opponents were trying to make her look bad (“Do you get credit for being right, or being lucky?”).

In this case it ought to have been a "stupid to fraudulent" ratio. Or "stupid to gullible" or "outright stupid to lazily adopting Media/Fox News talking points." Or perhaps just "stupid to stupid."

"Lipstick libertarian" would be more appropriate or funnier if there were any substantial libertarian to be found. Where is it?

How about a "Intstapundit to Jonah Goldberg" ratio?

I always thought she was 50% stupid and 50% evil, but after rethinking it, I have to agree with Roy. Her stupid to evil ratio is 60/40.

I base this on Megan's post about how old people shouldn't have health insurance because young people have to pay premiums. That's 6 parts of stupid and 4 parts of evil. There's no other way around it.

Look, Megan has never pretended to be a doctrinaire "big L" libertarian. But at least:

(1) Unlike faux libertarians like Glenn Reynolds, she at least seems to have some genuinely philosophically libertarian views of government (as opposed to people like Reynolds and Guilliani, who are authoritarians who just happen to be socially liberal).

(2) While some of the areas where she strays from libertarianism (civil liberties and the war) would seem to support the claim made by Roy and others that she is really a conventional conservative in libertarian clothing, she does at least attempt to square the circle on those issues, albeit not always successfully.

That being said, I tend to agree with the commenters here who say that the "lipstick libertarian" comment, fair or not, probably isn't sexist. It's just Roy's way of saying that she isn't a "real" libertarian.

"Stupid to adolescent."

she does at least attempt to square the circle on those issues, albeit not always successfully.

Well, only after the vast majority of media-influenced public opinion behooves her to do so in order to maintain an "independent" self-perception (e.g., Iraq Invasion, torture).

How about "Jonah Goldberg to Ann Althouse"?

Well, only after the vast majority of media-influenced public opinion behooves her to do so in order to maintain an "independent" self-perception (e.g., Iraq Invasion, torture).

My memory may be deficient, but I don't recall Megan ever buying into the (very unlibertarian) "remake the middle east" justification for the Iraq war (that was enthusiastically pushed by faux libertarians such as Reynolds). As I recall, and correct me if I'm wrong, she adopted the "Iraq as self defense" viewpoint that, while quite blinkered, is not necessarily inconsistent with libertarian principles.

That said, I find her annoying inability to give appropriate credit to people who were opposed to the war from the start pretty egregious. However, I don't think that that failure is particularly unlibertarian.

As for torture, while I, too, thought her reaction to Greenwald's recent piece was fairly clueless, Megan was never one of torture apologists. Is she perhaps less outraged on this issue than one would perhaps like to see from a self described libertarian? Perhaps, but that kind of criticism, even if true, is pretty weak tea.

Lipstick libertarian? WTF?

It means you are an airhead, Maris McHilton.

WTF, indeed. I even wrote a song about you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll4N_pvoSXI

Enjoy!

I stopped caring about what the Voice had to say after it went corporate.

...I was born in the Village, so I claim that indignance as a birthright if nothing else.

As for the article, it does a great job of confirming my biases about so-called-alt-paper journalism. I wish that didn't happen so often.

Michael J. Totten

I'll admit Roy can be funny even when he makes fun of me. And I get a big kick out of the fact that any Barack Obama supporter can be considered a right-wing blogger these days.

Wow, some folks here are vicious. Megan doesn't deserve to be lumped in with powerline, et. al.

Frank Rizzoo (a woman)

Are you saying that your critic Kathy G at The G Spot is a man?

John Doherty

Did you really advocate executing John Walker Lindh? If so, then that guy's got your stupid/evil ratio way wrong (I'll let you figure out whether I think it's too high or too low).

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