More thoughts on Eason Jordan and the Blogs

More thoughts on Eason Jordan and the Blogs February 11, 2005

I’m glad he resigned – clearly Jordan couldn’t afford to have the tape released, and his lame back-pedalling played and replayed before mass audiences. The timing is kind of lousy, thought. This resignation is the equivalent of a “Friday Night Document Dump…” by Monday, the news will be on to something else, most of the people in the country will not even know what happened, and those bloggers who continue to nag for the tape will be ignored as having become “obsessed.”

Very shrewd move by a man who stopped being shrewd a long time ago.

Stones Cry Out suggests that the blogosphere celebrations and self-congratulations be short and sweet. I concur. Not only because – as SCO maintains – there are so many other stories that need attention, but because as I suggested here, how we succeed is as important to consider as succeeding, itself, and (as Machiavelli taught) continued success counts on a willingness to try different tactics.

I would hate to see bloggers, and their growing reputations, diminished because they didn’t know when to back off a little in order to stave off exhaustion. A good boxer knows how to do that – how to bob and weave and dance and catch a breath. Only an amateur will come out swinging and forget to breathe. That’s when the Defending Champ, wiser-through-experience will clobber him and lay him out, exposing him to ridicule as the crowds sneer and say, “go back to the gym…you’re not ready…”

The young boxer, disgraced, will have to then go back and re-train, but his reputation will have been damaged, and he will have to work twice as hard to prove himself and not be regarded with a jaundiced eye. I don’t want that to happen to the blogs, that’s all.

And while I’m on a boxing metaphor, let’s remember that Muhammed Ali didn’t merely pummel his opponents; he wooed them, he teased them and taunted them, he played psychological games with them. He made them chase him around the ring and wore them out. He would use his foes’ own energies against them, particularly late in a bout, by mocking them. Remember that? He’d get a fighter tired, and then he’d taunt him and mock him, and the fighter would get so angry he would lose any lingering finesse, and flail out – using the last of his energy…whereupon Ali would scrunch up his pretty face and deliver one debilitating punch, and the other guy would go down. Boom!

I still think my little blog gave some worthwhile advice, but I will admit perhaps I tendered it too hastily! :-) All that said, enormous props go out to Captains Quarters Blog, Hugh Hewitt, Powerline, TKS, Michelle Malkin and LaShawn Barber, and many, many other blogs who did yeoman’s work on the whole issue.


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