Loudness

Loud, louder, louder still. The voices scream across the internet wires. Ann Coulter says this. Randi Rhodes says that. Michelle Malkin shouts. Cindy Sheehan yells. An Obama activist makes accusations. A Clinton supporter responds.

Who are these folks that are driving our political conversations? How many understand the value of looking at both sides of an issue? In our 24/7 world, opinion is cheap and finding it on the internet is free.

Take Ann Coulter. She is intelligent, a lawyer, and an Ivy League grad. Yet who is there to rein her in? Does she report to an editor at CBS or a big city newspaper? No. She hawks books and gets publicity by becoming more and more outrageous in her opinions. She has to get loud to have her voice heard over the herd of others who are trying to make a buck off politicial commentary.

Michelle Malkin is a free wheeling blog writer. Her right wing comments are strange seeing that she came from the historically liberal and free thinking Oberlin College. Once again, Malkin has to come up with opinions that are so off the wall, that she will get any publicity. Perhaps her biggest claim to fame was a public rebuke by another loud but much more sophisticated journalist, MSNBC's Chris Matthews.

On the liberal side you have folks like Cindy Sheehan and Randi Rhodes. Sheehan was a household name a few years ago when she rightly dogged President Bush for the Iraq War and the death of her son in that war. But Sheehan did not know when her time on stage should end and has become a long winded blowhard for the extreme left. Rhodes, a little known radio host on little known liberal Air America, has just hit the news world with her incredibly crude comments about Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton. Want to get some minutes of notice, then be a minor celebrity like Rhodes, and call fellow Democrats/liberals "F...... Whores!"

At least in Rhodes' story, there was accountability as Air America has suspended her and might fire her from their radio crew. And that is the problem in a nutshell. Too much commentary is not thought out. The only thing many so called columnists and bloggers care about is getting publicity and the money and fame that streams from that. No one is telling Coulter and the others not to stick to their ideas and beliefs. But say it in a way that is smart and shows some regard for the opinions of others.

When all is said and done, there might be a reason that the most reliable voting bloc is the one that is least familiar with the insanity of the internet. These voting seniors still read their local newspapers and still watch the network evening news shows. There they get their news in a way that is balanced and to a much larger extent free from the anger and shrillness that the younger audience gets from the so called opinion makers of the new technology.