Paul Helgesen is an information technology consultant, lawyer, educator and novice blogger.

His bio is moderately uninteresting - instead, he has chosen to reveal the political roadmap which led him to start blogging and why he today is a Democrat, albeit a centrist one, with naive ideas about the formation of a centrist political party:

The Road to the Present

In my younger days, I was a take-no-prisoners hawk. The GOP, Nixon, the death penalty - those were pinnacles among my beliefs - the "sissy" US Supreme Court one of my pet peeves.

With age, I suppose came maturity, and the changing political landscape, in combination with some of the recent global events of mind-boggling proportions, all contributed to a condition I will analogize to 'political cataracts' - the vision blurred, and the intellect gradually gained ground on, and overtook, the euphoria of being a chest-thumping republican.

I supported Perot, and for a while I was very excited about the prospects of a legitimate third party.

Those dreams and principles have been set aside for the moment, however. We now have a more serious agenda. I firmly believe we have a governmnet gone amok with power - and power, mind you, which the American electorate did not intend to bestow upon the president.

I also firmly believe that a majority of the electorate, if given a chance to pipe in, would NOT, agree with the direction the current administration has taken in the areas of international and domestic policy.

We urgently need a regime change at home. "Four more years" of this insanity may well destroy our 225 years of unbroken democracy, and give the rest of the world a smack on the side of the head like never before done, in the annals of recorded history. The whole world is a democracy, or meant to be - but this forced 'freedom' to any country or population which doesn't emulate our particular culture or ethos of 'only our nation will be allowed to possess WMD - 'cause we be the only nation the world can trust' - is hubris personified, and the greatest invitation to counterinsurgence since Attila the Hun made his run for global supremacy.

So here I am, today, a committed Democratic wannabe, but without the Liberal or Democratic leadership to take me (us) towards a centrist meritocracy over the next ten years.

The choice between the two candidates offered up for the 2000 presidential election was depressing, to say the least. I remember thinking,"in this country of 280 million people, are these two lukewarm politicians really the best we can muster, from our major political parties?? - are the Dems and the GOP each, separately, saying that our guy is the best that money could buy??"

I was unhappy to see Bush II end up the winner - and I won't even bother to comment on the manner in which he gained the White House. But truthfully, I don't think that "Gore in the White House", during today's domestic and global conflicts, would have brought about the end of our problems, as we know them today.

My biggest, immediate problem with GWB as our new leader was an enormous embarrassment, on behalf of our entire nation, but very personal as to my own ego, whenever Bush spoke ad lib. The fact that he often would read prepared speeches via invisible prompting screens only deepened the pain. It just became so obvious that the guy was incapable of expressing even relatively simple ideas without running afoul of either words or logic. "Our President is a functional illiterate," I remember muttering to myself - it was the hardest notion to get used to. And then listening to Colin Powell and wondering why these two guys' names got mixed up in the nomination process. Even now, two years later, the pain and embarrassment are still there, although I must admit GWB's on-the-job experience is paying off. He has now graduated to an eight-grade equivalency level when speaking on the cuff, as opposed to the fifth-grade designation I assigned him right out of the gate.

I have contributed to the political commentary, principally via a satirical website I set up. A typical commentary is linked here and here and here. The entire archive can be accessed here.

The 2002 midterm elections were, of course, an utter disaster. It also marked the time when I started paying attention, in detail, and in depth, to how the Republicans carried their campaign to victory.

Typically, I cringe when I read the rightist commentary, but I force myself to analyze the strategy, the planning and the dynamics that so forcefully have brought forth the unified GOP Congress and White House.

"OUTMANUVERED" - there is no question about it.

We may all take pleasure in our personal knowledge that GWB is a "moron" - but I have to give it to him - he has managed to assemble a group of advisers around him which - while far from being flawless - is head and shoulders above any policy/strategy construct the Dems have been able to conjure up.

Let me comment on the new phenomenon called "blogging"

At last count, there are 750,000 bloggers - and it is, of course, impossible to read them all. Luckily for us newcomers, a hierarchy has already been established, and amazingly - there seems to be little controversy over who the leading bloggers are.

By universal count, "leading" means the blogger whose site is visited most often - unique visitors count. "Leading" does not mean someone whose opinion necessarily reflects the opinion of the deepest thinker. It is with bloggers as with newspapers - circulation counts, but the news is free. This reminds me of Bill Gate's comment way back in the annals of the DOJ-Microsoft case when he wryly suggested that it was kind of silly to talk about marketshare among browsers when every developer of a browser gave away their product for free.

As bloggers go, it is easy for a novice looking into this new media to find the biggest circulation bloggers. You would never find newspapers plugging each others' editorial pages - but bloggers are a different, "new media" breed - they happily link to their kindred brothers, and they enthusiastically point to scoops written by their ideological competitors. "Competitors" is actually far too strong a term - I find the bloggers more like a cooperative venture where everyone writes under his own pen name, but where the survival and publicity of the entire common enterprise is more important that winning an occasional joust of one-up-manship against "competing" blogger.

While as I said above, I have only sampled less-than-one-percent of all blogs, I will summarize my observations in the hope that the statistical inference is correct:

1. There are an awful lot of "rightist" bloggers

2. The liberal or leftist bloggers are in the definite minority.

3. There do not seem to be many (anyone out there?) centrist bloggers.

This could, perhaps, be explained by two different reasonings.

a) In the spectrum of political positioning, since the medium is free, and since, presumably the unique visitors visit more than one site a day, could it be that the more radical you are, the more visitors you attract??

b) Or could it be that in this bipolar politiziced country that we live in, there is no room for the centrist point of view??

I hope not - since it is the political plank upon which I initially will wander into the bloggers' world.

I would intuitively have thought that the spectrum of bloggers would follow a standard bell curve. [NOTE: by choosing the illustrated bell curve graphic to explain my point, I do not mean to connect "intelligence" with ideological positioning. The given graphic simply met my objective for illustrating the point - and it just so happened to explain the Gaussian distribution of IQ across largesamples of humanoids.]

Instead, I believe we have a phenomenon I will call Inverse Bellcurve if we were to attempt to graph our webloggers by ideological spectrum, giving amplitude emphasis to their strident positioning.



In this imaginary demographic, plotting weblogger's political leaning on a scale of 0 [extreme liberal] to 10 [extreme conservative], the area under the right hand curve far outweighs the left handed side, and there is a relative paucity of bloggers occupying the center. The number scale on the left {Y-axis} could conveniently indicate the number of webloggers camped at every ideological crosshatch [in tens of thousands].

My take on some of the rightist bloggers. Some of them are Law School Professors, some even with a year's experience working as law clerks for US Supreme Court Justices. Most of them are damn annoying - selfrighteous, stubborn, rigid, self-appointed leaders of the right - so arrogant that sometimes I feel like clawing at them. Their legal scholarship and naturally stilted form of writing legal briefs have made a constant, and telling, mark on their writing style. Regardless of subject matter, they write their comments, analyses and critiques of fellow bloggers' contributions in the style in which they have found refuge - that of the legal brief, but without the supporting footnotes. Terse, conclusory statements abound. "The man is an idiot", they write, without more support than their belief in the infallibility of their own thinking. In truth, they are more polite - they don't call the other blogger an "idiot" - although it is not hard to read between the lines - rather, they take notice of his 'intellectual shallowness.' Professional courtesy, I suppose.

As I have said elsewhere, I force myself to read the conservative bloggers' commentary, because while I stridently disagree with almost all of their positions, I nonetheless am learning something. I am doing what I secretly hope they would be doing - listening to the other side, rather than abjectly dismissing all liberal commentary like so much illiterate drivel.

By contrast, while I feel warm and fuzzy reading the liberal, anti-{Iraq}war press, I have sadly concluded that while recognizing I agree with many of the left-side writer's points, I am not really LEARNING ANYTHING NEW. Yes, it is wonderful to feel a part of a solidarity, to bask in the knowledge that "WE" are right - but where does it really lead us. We seem to parade, with signs and pithy sayings, in a two-person-deep oval, much like a small group of union folks on strike on a sidewalk, a tight, slow, halting, ovoid march, placards in hand, and vocal "Honk if you Agree" encouragements to passing-by motorists, but at the end of the day, have we - tangibly - marched one inch closer to the objective, or is our reward for the day's exercise the uphill-looking feeling that "we did the best we could".

Part of the depression, I think, is the realization that the one powerful tool we have - is no longer within reach, at least for another twenty-two months. We had the chance last November to REALLY to something definitive and tangible about today's problem, but we blew it. Today's fire cannot cancel the apathy of last Fall. The apathy of the group, I mean.

Those of us who voted, did so in the belief that our vote would make the difference. Unfortunately, the 2002 election was not determined by the voters - the outcome was shaped solely by those who could have, and would have, but didn't, in the final instance, go to the polling station. If we, as a nation, today could repeat the exercise of last year's election, I believe the outcome would be opposite.

More of the same.

James Taranto is a mainline, ultra-conservative blogger.

Writing from his high pulpit of the Wall Street Journal domain, his "Best of the Web" blog is of course, the pinnacle of hubris. It may be considered, by many, the "best" that the Internet can offer up, but I am willing to bet that this particular judgment is aided considerably if the juror is an arch-conservative, himself.

Nonetheless, being first to grab the moniker, the WSJ now has effectively hijacked the "Best of the Web" label as a conservative's Holy Grail.

What is his liberal counterpart to do?? - name his own weblog "Second-best of the Web"?? -- Actually, the Wall Street Journal does not have a monopoly on the "Best" moniker. Read the Best of Blogs - a wonderful liberal counterpart to the WSJ.

However, read Taranto's comment on political party self-policing (Jan 16 - second story of the day's archive)- useful. Ostensibly written to comment on the White House's filing of a legal brief in the University of Michigan controversy, the article points out how the GOP has had much more success than the Dems in ferreting out embarrassing candidates.

There is a glimmer of truth therein - and we can all learn from reading the 'opponents' views.