Friedersdorf has a long, dead-on and devastating piece on Glenn Reynolds. A taste:
Instapundit punts on the substance of so many matters, choosing instead to make the pithiest point that jives with his readers’ sensibilities. There’s a climate change conference? Well is it cold there? Did anyone fly there on a private plane? Did any MSM reporter betray bias in their writeup? There’s your Instapundit climate change coverage for the day. Single instances of this behavior aren’t egregious, but the aggregate effect is to set daily Instapundit readers adrift in a constant stream of straw men and irrelevant points cheaply scored, losing site of the issue for the pith.
But this is the real meat:
Every time I’ve done an “Instapundit sanity test,” where I show one of these kerfuffles he’s occasionally engaged in to apolitical friends clueless about the blogosphere, they’re sympathetic to the person accused of having misunderstood him. “Wait, he’s against torture? Well don’t just show me this heh’ post that set off the kerfuffle, show me the post where he makes the best case against torture. Oh, you can’t ever recall having read one like that?” These people tend to naively presume that political arguments are grounded in beliefs about specific issues, rather than the belief that one side is right overall, and therefore it is fun and loyal and savvy and righteous and pithy to zing the other side, ideally acting as though the zing is rooted in some greater symbolic import, or is another data point revealing the way things are, instead of being, say, a transient, irrelevant example of hypocrisy by the least defensible guy on the other side.