Centerfield

Brock's a pinball! Seriously, my impression of Brock has always been that he craves moral certainty, and thus can't deal with the ambiguities of reality.

He goes from one end to the other because he keeps getting disillusioned by the current side he's on, but still wants to be on the side of the angels. He wants to be a True Believer, but reality keeps interfering with his vision. Thus the wild swings to extremes.

I heard David Horowitz on Hannity's radio show (I stomached about 5 minutes). He's worse than Brock. Brock from highly partisan right to high partisan left. Horowitz went from nutcase left to wingnut right.

On the radio, Horowitz was saying how the ACLU pretends to defend civil rights but it actually is a front organization that wants to destroy America.

Even Hannity thought that guy was a tad to the right.

I've read and recommend Horowitz's autobiography, Radical Son. He's an interesting person, but he has a Manichean aspect to his personality.

My impression, having read Brock's last two books, is that he is currently 'doing penance' for what he sees as his past sins -- especially in terms of adherence to one side so much that it blinded him to his own 'journalistic' transgressions, which he found horrific when he realized what he had done: embraced an 'ends justify the means' working approach.

So, I wouldn't be so quick to label him a liberal-in-all-things, although he IS consciously providing a daily debunking of right wing spin via Media Matters. This in itself is a very worthwhile effort: part of the required 'push back' against the dominance of the national conversation by one worldview in a partisan package.

Give him a few years. We may then discover more of his actual political views. Now is not the time.

And I recommend MediaMatters for perusal every few days. It helps keep one informed.

I think for some people the center isn't really "there" as an option. There's no center party, and you have a largely liberal party and a largely conservative one. So those are the two sides, right?

John Avlon talked recently about his efforts to work his way into the pundit world. He's been talking to producers of the cable shows and trying to get them to see the need for putting a centrist in the mix of views when they have panels. One of them said he just didn't know how to put that on screen -- they use a split screen, with the liberal on one side and the conservative on the other. So where does the centrist go? Can viewers handle having more than two options?

I trade off. Most days I alternate Media Matters (liberal slant "fact-checking") with Media Research Center (conservative slant "fact-checking") so I can get the spin from both the left and right, and follow it up with regular doses of Accuracy In Media (more conservative FC) and Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (their liberal counterpart).

Then when I get tired of "facts" from the factions, I head over to Annenberg FactCheck for some more objective and less histrionic takes, or even to Snopes.com for some more serious draining of the current cesspits of rumor and innuendo.