“I’d say that there’s a certain flavor of right-wing blogging (and politics) that took no time at all becoming about ten times as humor-impaired as the worst liberal schoolmarm you ever encountered.”

I’ve always believed that being an ideologue precludes having a sense of humor. For much of my adult life, especially in college, the most prominent cases in point were on the left (i.e., some feminists and various other identity-politics-driven types) and in the 1980s, when they still had some influence on public debate, it was good sport for young conservatives and apolitical comedians to poke fun at them and watch them overreact. Now that the left has been largely driven out of the arena, quite a few middle-aged folks on the right are showing that they can’t take the sort of ridicule that they used to dish out.

OTOH, liberal humorlessness hasn’t really gone away, either. we’ve already discussed Trudeau. And while it depresses me to say so, I think Al Franken has gotten steadily less funny the more politically engaged he’s become. The old SNL and Comedy Central gag writer still makes me laugh, but the new would-be senatorial candidate and standard-bearer for embattled liberalism? Not so much.

That said, with regards to blogging, I think he has the faint vestiges of a point. My political blog-reading is quite limited–I don’t like the echo-chamber aspects of it, and few of them have much to offer me either as entertainment or in terms of helping me understand big issues. The ones I do read regularly, I read for any number of reasons–because I know the blogger personally, or he or she has some demonstrated expertise, or writes well, or possesses a good sense of humor–but they all boil down to the same question: “Who the hell is this person, and why exactly should I give a damn what he or she thinks?” And even if I like them, I have no illusions that they’re going to change the world.

I wouldn’t say that it hit a nerve. The point of the strip seems to be that bloggers don’t make as much money as Trudeau’s wife and journalist friends and are thus lazy or losers. The torture-loving jackasses at Powerline are a lot of bad things but they aren’t lazy or poor.

He seems especially disturbed by young people. Where his characters used to be based on close observation of cultural types, they are now based on stereotypes. The interactions between the older charaters that Trudeau cares about and the younger characters that Trudeau doesn’t care about often gets ugly. It’s like the baby boomer matrix.

On the other hand, those “day by day” comics that the right wing bloggers are always linking to are spectacularly bad.