REPUTATION DESERVED

In an article titled "Things we shouldn’t have said about Andrew Bolt" editor Jonathan Green describes Crikey's high standards:

We’d rather build a reputation for reason and well-turned argument than for insult and glib denunciation.

Crikey blogger Possum Comitatus does some reputation building in a much-lauded post titled "Why Andrew Bolt should be Sodomised with a Calculator – Part 142":

You know what shits me to tears, I mean really shits me to tears to the point where pulling someone’s arm off and beating them to death with their own severed limb starts sounding like one of the more civilised responses available?

It’s when MSM sites like this herd the dross of the internet into advertising, by tickling the bigoted little underbellies of their audience with pig-ignorant bullshit being masqueraded around as “fact”.

As Bolt might ask: "What is it with the left and violence?"

Bolt is further described as a "Caped Crusader for the Cretinous" and "The Undescended Testicle.*"

* The Undescended Testicle.
Andrew Bolt doesn’t like criticism – fair enough, but the cure for that is to stop writing bullshit – anyways, he especially doesn’t like criticism when it pings him exactly for what he does. He really, really, really doesn’t like that kind of criticism when it comes from Crikey. A while ago there was a flair up with Bolt over Somali crime numbers, where Bolt couldn’t ignore what was said here (our readership is too widespread, and there was far too much mirth going on in the blogosphere at his expense over it all), but neither could he confront it properly because to do so would be to send his readers to a complete takedown of their hero, that describes many of them as the suckers they are. So the poor princess was in a bit of a pickle.

But rather than have the balls to link into the article here and address it properly, he used just one ball and quoted very, very selectively from the article (in comments too) in such a way as to remove all context and pretend I was actually agreeing with what he was on about.

He has enough balls to selectively confront his detractors, but not enough balls to do it in the open and transparent way that is the acceptable norm of the modern online world.

He is The Undescended Testicle of the Internetz

Clever stuff. In amongst those many hundreds of words of rant -- the post runs to almost 2,000 words -- Possum analyses asylum seeker trends, deciding Bolt's position is "pig-ignorant horseshit" and he should therefore "shut the fuck up".

Unfortunately, Possum's elaborate analysis appears to be flawed:

• Bolt was voicing his opinions on apparent trends in boat people numbers, not asylum seeker numbers.
• Since asylum seeker policy changed less than a year ago it is perhaps too early for a statistically significant trend to emerge.

It's a first class rant nonetheless.

Update: Possum is told his analysis is "worthless" but there's no way he's going to admit it.