What explains the presence of Patrick McIllheran on the op-ed pages of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, other than he is a marketing device. Somehow the feeling of management is that there is a need for balance served by putting before us someone who is so conservative. The only problem is that no one on the staff of the Journal is as liberal as Paddy Mac is doctrinaire and partisan. No, that does not include Eugene Kane.
The oddity of Paddy is his ability to be aggressively naive and cynical at the same time. Case in point was his blog post on Karl Rove this week.
Pegging Rove as corrupt is as natural to the senses as saying water is wet. Yet in Paddy Partisan world, liberal anger towards Rove is miss-applied. "They saw Rove had talent used in the service of Bush, so they attacked him."
Could it ever enter Paddy's mind that maybe, just maybe, many people are sick and tired of Rove's immorality (even the toady John McCain), his win at all costs style and his scorched earth tactics that win the war but sicken the rest of us, all in the service of electing one of the most incompetent Presidents in the history of this country?
As Hunter over at DailyKos put it:
He (Rove) could carve up constituencies with the best of them, and divide the country as easily as columns on a spreadsheet -- and with no more thought -- but Karl Rove was no more a political genius than Jeffrey Dahmer was a brilliant culinary artist.
In Paddy's sunny world he sees only genius, because this twisted handling of the electorate was designed to get something McIllheran wanted. He fails to recognize the national unity that got rode over in the process. Hey, we're in a war, aren't we?
But maybe the similarities between Karl and Paddy are being missed.
It would be nice to think every media outlet in some way does something to add to the public good. McIllheran though adds nothing to the local dialogue except snarky morsels served up for a market niche.
Oddly, these are people who will never accept the Journal's news reporting as valid because it fails to paint the world in the colors they want.
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