Espresso Pundit and Sonoran Alliance blogs kept up their slugfest today, with SA's multiple-personality "Chewie" looking the worse for wear. The underlying subject remains the one New Times has been harping on for a few months: When good bloggers go bad -- anonymously.
Greg Patterson, a former Republican state legislator, argues in his latest post that someone setting up a "popular blog" should set standards that including "protecting individuals from anonymous attacks."
Funny, though -- we never heard a word from Patterson about the pre-election probloganda site, aclutimwillsayanythingtogetelected.blogspot.com, which was hoisted onto the Internet anonymously and published nameless articles and pictures like the one at left. As with the Farrell Quinlan debate over the same issues in January, conservatives always sputter when forced to swallow their own medicine.
Patterson predicts that Sonoran Alliance will lose popularity unless it dumps Chewie's wrong-headed commentaries, forgetting for a moment that controversy breeds attention. While Chewie's logic and reading comprehension skills need polishing, his half-baked diatribes are still more interesting to read than cut-and-paste news releases.
It's the site's credibility that seems likely to suffer. But as we've pointed out, anonymous political blogging has never been that credible, (at least not the way it's done in this town).
If SA retains its policy of allowing anonymous dillweeds to post nearly anything they want, as long as it smells conservative, the blog might as well keep Chewie around for laughs.
