The unbearable triteness of political blogging

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while have probably noticed that I'm doing fewer and fewer political posts, much to the detriment of my traffic. I'm just all politicked out. Some day, probably sooner than later, I'll get interested again. Just not now.

This is not to say that I'm not--at least vaguely--aware of the issues of the day. It does mean, however, that I no longer spend hours clicking back and forth between combatants like these guys, trying to figure out who said what to whom first in the never-ending left/right blogosphere game of one upmanship. In the past, I'd spent whole days reading everybody's posts on the latest fray--partly because if you fall into one of these things in medias res it's really hard to figure out what's going on and partly because it's kind of like watching a trainwreck. I seldom got into the fray myself. The big boys seemed to have it covered, plus by the time I'd read what everybody else had to say I'd find that everything had already been said. Or I'd become bored with the whole thing.

And that's what it is: Boring. It's also petty and stupid. And it generally goes something like this:

1. Right-wing bigshot says A.
   
2. Left-wing blogosphere gets all up in arms, parsing every syllable of the bigshot's remarks.
   
3. Right-wing blogosphere makes fun of left-wing bloggers, adding that blogger so-and-so had no problem with the much more vile statement three months ago made by left-wing bigshot.
   
4. Left-wing blogosphere retorts that right-wing blogger is homophobic and hates brown people.
   
5. Right-wing blogosphere takes umbrage, occasionally flashes his civil rights credentials.
   
6. Left-wing blogosphere calls original bigshot a faggot and implies that right-wing blogger Mr. X is probably a latent homosexual.
   
7. Right-wing blogosphere muses that the left-wing blogosphere is supposed to really like faggots.
   
8. Left-wing blogosphere brings up incident several years ago when a certain right-wing blogger was mean to a faggot.
   
9. Right-wing blogger brings up old incident in which left-wing blogosphere verbally attacked attacked a black person because he happened not to agree with them.
   
10. And on and on and on.

It's like a Eugene O'Neil play without the booze.

It's not that I don't like a good exchange of invective. I always enjoy it when Ace goes after Andy Sullivan; I also love reading his commenters. Ann Althouse does good takedown. Althouse also occasionally goes off the deep end herself, which keeps things interesting.

But I'm pretty sick of the rest of it.