Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Andrew Sullivan lists some possible choices for Time magazine's Man/Woman/Newsmaker of the Year: Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, the "gay American", Christopher Reeve...

and the Pajamahadeen.

Awesome as that last choice would be, it would never happen. Time would inevitably give generic credit to pan-partisan "bloggers," while putting as much spotlight on Josh Marshall, Daily Kos and (argh) Wonkette as that New York Times Magazine article a few months back. Frankly, I think a serious case can be made that the Pajama-clad warriors of the Internet had a bigger, more important, and more specific impact than bloggers in general, - pushing back against a mainstream media that had become drunk with rage against Bush and was botching the facts in the process.

Bloggers spotlighted the Swift Boat Vets and did the best research and analysis of their claims long before the mainstream media decided they were worth attention. We all know the deal with the CBS memo, Bill Burkett, Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, and Joe Lockhart. While the mainstream media just echoed the New York Times on that missing explosives story (and the Times basically echoed Mohammed al-Baradei's complaints about the Bush administration), the blogs took the story seriously and pointed out how little we knew about where these explosives are, or when they were taken.

A small band of Internet-based thinkers and linkers took on the Sauronic Eye of CBS and the Death Star of the entire mainstream media - until recently, the most powerful force in American politics - and triumphed, leaving a decadent relic of a bygone era utterly defeated.

Or you know, they could pick "The Generic Terrorist" as the face of 2004. Wow, that's daring. A make-up call for 2001, I suppose.

Look, who dominated the news this year? President Bush. He was loved, he was hated. Against everything his opponents in America and abroad could throw at him, he triumphed. How could one argue that anybody else - the gay American? Christopher Reeve? - had a bigger impact on the year's news?

By the way, some left-of-center friends who saw Sullivan's appearance on the season finale of Bill Maher's HBO show were up in arms recently, calling Sully a far-right conservative. I pointed out that label is at least not always accurate, as he recently called me "desperate and unconvincing."

I'm sure many Kerry Spot readers who read Sullivan during this campaign season would conclude that he was, when decision time came, a loud anti-Bush lefty. The lesson? Where one places him on the political spectrum depends on when you read or hear him and what he's writing or talking about.

[Posted 11/17 05:37 PM]