Poor, poor pitiful me

After a weekend of beer drinking, fake gambling, and aluminum foil, it's turning into media criticism week at Cole Slaw Blog. We have refrained from posting on the Time Magazine cover story of Ann Coulter. Atrios now points out this Columbia Journalism Review interview with John Cloud, a gentleman, and the chief propagandist behind the Coulter article.

Mr. Cloud is not a professional. He reacts to criticism with ad hominem attacks against his critics. He bashes, inter alia, David Brock and Eric Alterman. He justifies his article by saying that his critics are just as bad as Coulter. He rationalizes and equivocates when his interviewer points out an error. He is wildly defensive and articulates his own paranoia:

Now David Brock is a very famous hater of Ann Coulter. They used to be friends, they're not friends anymore. He is also a serial liar. David Brock wrote a whole book saying, 'Oh, my other books? They were lies.' So I don't think David Brock has a lot of credibility on the question of Ann Coulter. And what they are doing is a smear job. That's his other history -- David Brock has a history of smear jobs. And this is a smear job against me personally.

Nice going, J.C. You simultaneously managed to tip your hand as to your sympathies while portraying yourself as a paranoid with delusions of grandeur. It's one thing for a journalist to privately view himself as the victim of a "smear job," but another to whine about that publicly and inject himself into the story.

You're not a tender freshman being bullied by the seniors. Treat yourself to some lithium, a girlfriend, and a vacation. And save the bullshit neurosis for your therapist.