Inside Politics

Online feud?

Sparks are flying between two giants of the Internet, after online news hound Matt Drudge directed his sarcastic wit toward conservative pundit Michelle Malkin in a recent broadcast of his Sunday radio program.

Referring to Mrs. Malkin’s “Vent” programs on her popular HotAir.com video blog, Mr. Drudge said, “It’s ridiculous. Looks like, you know, Captain Kangaroo time, Michelle. Get real.”

Mrs. Malkin, a Fox News Channel contributor whose syndicated column appears regularly in The Washington Times, yesterday sprang to the defense of her HotAir.com team, including video producer Bryan Preston and lead blogger AllahPundit.

“I’m proud of what our team has accomplished in less than a year. … We’ve gone from nowhere to a top-30 site on Technorati’s Top 100 list,” she wrote.

Mrs. Malkin reminded Mr. Drudge of his own words in a 1998 speech to the National Press Club: “Now, with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world.” She added the admonition: “The Internet is a big enough place for all of us. No need to act like the threatened [mainstream media] you became famous for revolting against years ago.”

Unelected office

“As every carbon-based life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president,” David Ehrenstein writes in the Los Angeles Times.

“Since making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in all quarters — musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of being the first African American to be elected to the White House,” Mr. Ehrenstein said. “But it’s clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the ‘Magic Negro.’

“The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th-century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. ‘He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist,’ reads the description on Wikipedia. …

“He’s there to assuage white ‘guilt’ (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

“As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic — embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And that’s not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is ‘Magic’ …”

Name left out

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