Demanding Respect Without Earning It

I'm with John on this one...what the hell?!

Indeed, the big liberal blogs have a formal boycott against linking to TNR because they consider us the enemy on precisely those grounds.

Even if you grant Jonathan Chait's point that there's a "formal boycott" against TNR by the big liberal blogs (which, as John pointed out, is hogwash), then could you really blame us? This whole unsupported allegation of a "formal" boycott against TNR is business as usual for a publication that all but declared war on the liberal blogosphere with their made-up scandal from last year regarding the Advertising Liberally blogad group. Throughout the whole ordeal, TNR's senior editor Jason Zengerle accused the liberal blogging community of a "a sheep-like obedience" to Markos Moulitsas and insisted that we all were "follow[ing] Kos's orders to stay silent ". As a way of highlighting out his journalistic and ethical superiority to the spineless amateurs in the blog-world, Zengerle supported his claim, in part, through a fake email from a source he's still protecting. (So, who's the sheep again?) Considering TNR's complete lack of respect for the bloggers they think should be linking to them, even if there was a formal policy of not linking to The New Republic (which there isn't), they would have earned it.

Besides, the real reason I rarely link to The New Republic is because most of their content is locked behind a subscription wall. I'm not going to link to an article that my readers can't see for themselves. I get emails from TNR all the time advertising articles that sound like they'd be interesting, but not enough to pull out my credit card for the privilege of reading what other sites give away for free. Sorry, TNR, but your writers aren't that good. If I want to read some interesting political commentary, there's always Salon, Slate, The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, newspaper editorial pages, various conservative publications and a million or so blogs.