Keep Clicking The Links

By Cernig

I'm told, by Sean-Paul at the Agonist, James Joyner and Kevin Drum among others, that Newshoggers readers are great at clicking links. Despite our comparatively small readership, A-list folks like Kevin, James and Sean-Paul notice in their sitemeter statistics that you're following the link to their original post. If we cite an article, news report or blog post you don't just take our word for it - you check for yourselves (and often come back to disagree with us in comments!).

Which is nice for us, as we frequently find we're punching above our weight in who, rather than how many. Thanks. We're very happy to have such a well-informed, sceptical and enquiring audience.

However, it seems to me that many conservative websites don't have such healthily enquiring readers. As an example, I wrote a post yesterday about the announced plan for US permanent bases in Iraq with the last line being "And staying was the plan all along." That last line got picked up by Curt at Flopping Aces as an example of how the whinging lefties were wailing. His post, with the link intact, was blockquoted by other wingnut blogs. Between them, they had maybe four times Newshoggers readership. The total number of inbounds from those blogs, checking to see if that one throwaway line was all there was? Five.

Somehow, I suspect there's a connection between that incurious trust in their echo-chamber and the NRCC's failure to find any independently creative minds willing to make You-Tube ads for the Republicans.

Those who originally supported the invasion of Iraq but are still capable of independent thought are admitting, though, that the dirty, smelly hippies had it right all along.