The Daily Caller

I gave Spencer short shrift when I tweeted earlier; he’s doing the lord’s work, and deserves recognition for it.

But, with credit established: let’s assess.  The Politico-with-more-irritating-headlines part seems fairly well done, I guess, I couldn’t really say. But this is offensive and inexplicable; this reads like the first entry from an about-to-be-abandoned blogspot site; and this — well, I guess we’ve all run into that one guy who gets drunk and ruddy and decides to boom forth some comedy, because his unapologetic, un-PC take on current events never fails to elicit big laffs from people who know how important his dad is.  But most of us have the good sense to smile, say “that’s okay” when he spills his drink on us, and make our excuses.  We certainly don’t publish the guy’s nonsense.

Anyway, almost all of these examples are stolen from James Wolcott, who also manages much better one-liners than I can (I stole the other one from Alex G).  But really: the opinion section needs, um, tweaking.  You can’t just take the celebrity-fueled idiocy of HuffPo opinion pieces, subtract the celebrity and expect things to work out.

I suspect there are a bunch of competent, harried young reporters hammering away at the substantive side of this operation.  I might not like the audience they’re courting or the way they’re courting it, but I know people like them, I know that they’re in a tough line of work, and I wish them well.  But for their sake, here’s hoping something gets done about that Superfund site of an opinion section.

UPDATE: Alright, this is true: last week, when DCist posted about the story, I came across this post and briefly took it at face value.  Then I read back in the archives a bit and became convinced that the site must be a parody blog set up by someone from TWI (the connection to the recovered-camera story is what fueled my suspicions).  I concluded that if I knew who Jim Treacher was it’d probably be hilarious, but I don’t, so I mostly just felt mildly irritated to have been taken in by that last entry.  Earlier ones betrayed a less refined comic voice — one that was a little too upfront with the “diary of my class trip to DC” tone that I took to be meant to belittle the real Treacher.

Anyway, nope, it’s the real thing, and I’m very confused.

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