From a reader:

Probably a lot of other people have reminded you of this, but wasn’t Trent Lott’s demise as majority leader an early accomplishment of bloggers, of left and right? And that shows that conservative bloggers have principles but leftist ones don’t. I can’t imagine leftists joining the chorus to oust Eason Jordan the way conservatives did to Trent Lott.

Me: Lots of folks have mentioned the first part, but not that many the second part. It’s certainly true that if conservatives hadn’t come out of the block very early — almost immediately really — to condemn Lott he probably wouldn’t have stepped down as Majority leader. It’s hard to think of a similar situation working out the same way on the left. That said, we should all keep in mind that Chris Dodd and Barney Frank really did stand-up for truth and justice in this whole Eason Jordan thing. I doubt this would have happened had they not. We should also remind people that the collection of scalps is not first and foremost the primary job of conservative journalists or bloggers. It’s a by-product of what they do in a few specific circumstances.