Muckrakers

The forces of light seem to be having a mixed month. The unfitness of the Bush Administration to govern continues to reach daylight, slowly awakening even many Bush loyalists from their slumber, but we keep losing some of our best soldiers. See here, here, and here, for example.

Now we've lost another, this one a little more obscure than the others, perhaps because of the ephemeral nature of syndicated columns. Uber muckraker Jack Anderson has left us to our own devices. (Ironically--or as a sign of things to come--Wikipedia's entry on "muckraker" mentions the Jack Anderson Award for investigative journalism, but not Anderson himself.)

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, once a labor of love and now a blogworld superstore, is launching a muckraking blog which he describes as:

dedicated to chronicling, explaining and reporting on the interconnected web of public corruption scandals bubbling up out of the reigning Washington political machine

He's been running a fundraiser for a couple of months to get the money to pay a couple of full time investigative reporters for the blog. Good luck. The ability to invest in reporting is what separates the blogs from . . . well, from the other blogs, as well as from the mainstream media. But back to Anderson for a moment:

I'm of the opinion that you can judge the quality of the muckraker by the deliciousness of the quotes that get resurrected when they die. By that standard, Anderson was a redwood among shrubs:

J. Edgar Hoover described Anderson as "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures." (Note: Not lower than the filth of vultures--lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures. Now that's low.)

And Anderson himself once famously said, "Contrary to popular theology, there is nothing that produces as much exhilaration and zest for living as an ugly, protracted, bitter-end vendetta that rages for years and comes close to ruining both sides."

Yowsah!

(By comparison, John Arivosis at Americablog, whom I read regularly and who rakes a pretty mean muck himself, has a some distance yet to go. His masthead has these three quotes--barbed, yes, and well-earned, but clearly not at Anderson level yet:

"Peppered with obscenity" - Concerned Women for America
"A particularly angry activist" - Family Research Council
"A bunch of wackos" - Rush Limbaugh

But then John's a young guy. He's got time to collect a scrapbook like Anderson's.)