political blogs fired

As an experiment, I asked my more politically-aware buddy Grumpy for the names of some political blogs that would represent both the left and the right. As I consider myself pretty centrist (or as Grumpy says, “moderate”), I was curious as to how I would react to these (differing, extreme) points of view.

Well, the experiment is over.

After reading them for a few weeks, I found myself unable to read them any more. “I ran out of time,” I thought to myself. This was really an excuse. The truth is that my curiosity over what makes the left the left and the right the right wasn’t anywhere near enough to overcome the feelings of tedium and disgust that I eventually felt while reading these things.

The executive summary of my experiment is this: the left- and right- wing blogs have a lot in common. They both scour the news for stories–however thin–with which to beat the other side with. They both focus not on the meat of the story (which would lead to useful debate), but the surrounding details, with which they harangue. Rarely do the left-wing and right-wing blogs talk about the same thing.

In any case, I removed those feeds from my RSS reader today, after not reading them for at least 2 weeks.