Blog Round Up

What some in the establishment media and the conservative cesspool, including talk radio, FauxNews and the blogsphere, said about Jill Carroll since she was released by her kidnappers after an 82 day captivity is simply hateful, reprehensible and nothing less than detestable — here’s just one example of what their reaction has been like.

Over the past couple of days some in the progressive blogsphere have wade in astonishment as the Right goes on about defaming Jill Carroll, the survivor of what must’ve been a traumatic experience:

First I’d like to call out a big fuck you to all the bloggers and wingut radio blowhards who assumed that since Jill Carroll isn’t a screeching, GOP operative harpy like Laura Ingraham that she is sympathetic to terrorists. She had the guts to get out there and try to report from the belly of the beast and got kidnapped and terrorized while doing it. And these pathetic little chickenhawks had the unmitigated gall to attack her — apparently because she managed to survive and because she was a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor. — Hullabaloo.

On the same topic, Joe at The Moderate Voice is being way too moderate in calling the Jill Carroll affair a black eye to blogging. No, Joe, this is a black eye to the crazy, racist, right wing, hating blogosphere. Don’t lump all of us in together on that one. Yes, we’re partisan, yes we’re on occasion shrill. We’re not liars. We’re not racist. And we won’t be dragged down into the mud pit occupied by the likes of Little Green Footballs and Free Republic just because we occupy the same cyberspace. — mcjoan, DailyKos.com.

Look, I know I don’t have to go into a lengthy sermon about the bravery of the journalists - men and women - who risk their necks to try to get us a true picture of what’s going on in Iraq, or any other war zone for that matter. It goes without saying that Jill Carroll and everyone else over there is extremely courageous and should be commended for what they’re doing. I’m also not going to try to psychoanalyze what would drive someone to want to go over there and do it in the first place.

I’ll just say that I don’t have the balls to do anything remotely that dangerous - and neither does Howard Kurtz. For journalists to not give this woman some room to breathe while she gets her bearings after spending 82 days as a hostage is simply unconscionable.

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Here’s the bottom-line: Whatever you think of Jill Carroll, Howard Kurtz owes the woman a big time public apology. And the Post really ought to stop the guy before he opines again. — Eric J. Weiner, HuffingtonPost.com.