NRO's Ed Whelan has apologized to Publius and Publius has accepted it. Both posts deserve credit for being forthright. Time to move on. But Whelan has discovered both a bane and beauty of blogging. Many, if not all of us, discover it eventually.
It's a wonderful thing to be able to get yourself worked up on a topic, or in a spat, and just blurt out what you think or have recently discovered. You may even have convinced yourself it's the coup de gras if things have turned into a fight. Then all of seconds later, if you're smart, you get to appreciate what you just did as a reader if you look at your blog. It's usually about then that you realize you've just done something significant for the whole world to see before having taken enough time pre-post to figure out just what it might be. Heh!
Whelan can relax in knowing that his liberal critics have now etched the moment into their collective soul in blog code and will inject it as the ad hominem of choice in any and every heated debate for some time: this from a guy who blah, blah, blah. If it's any consolation to Whelan, you usually stop wincing after the first few times. And for now you know the worst your critics can and will do - forewarned is forearmed and all that. My advice is to ignore it. It's done.
It's ironic that given blogging's technocentric existence, it's still its ability to remind us that we're human that's often the most fascinating element. Except for Reynolds, of course. He was designed by a consortium of scientists from the tech industry to give them the next new rationale to sell more PCs back in the day. The group has moved on to Twitter and applications beyond these days.
In any event, discovering our humanity, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, is always a good thing to my way of thinking. As human beings, it's one of the best ways we learn. And it won't be long before some blogger somewhere makes the next greatest reminder that we're all human of a blog post and we all too often inhuman bastards that are bloggers will be certain to circle round to pick the bones.
There couldn't be a better blood sport for intellects in this information age.
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