This'll be my last post on this, I promise.
I concede the points made in the follow-ups about my forgetting a few excellent left-leaning magazines and about the miserable state of political discourse, left, right or otherwise, in this country.
But the point of the Monitor article (which I didn't adhere to very closely myself) is that there's A LOT MORE outlets for rightist blathering. Someone dependent on royalties from The Baffler would die in short order, while the Manhattan Institute alone sustains the degraded lives of several dozen hacks. Those hacks are able to frame the debate in a way many people find engaging if not compelling. All we can do is shout "Imperialism!" or "Fascism!" at anything and everything - which isn't to say it's not a valid characterization. It often is.
Doug, I believe, offered up the lovely Ms. Coulter as proof of the poverty of rightwing punditry. And I agree. The point I took from the CSM piece was that a leftist equivalent of Coulter is an impossibility. Someone firing from the left so zanily and with such little information would find themselves unemployed and unemployable. Recall the buzz here when Chomsky was on CNN. Coulter is on TV with regularity. And she's taken seriously by more than a few.
My apologies for placing emphasis on readability. The point seems more sociological.
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