"Is that Clown from Dallas?"
Opinion makers and commenters need to take extra care not to make the same mistake they criticize in others. The classic example is the blog commenter who criticizes another's "spelling and grammer." Today's lesson comes from D Magazine owner Wick Allison, who took aim at The New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Allison says "her Pulitzer Prize was not awarded for her fact-checking." What factual error did Wick Allison catch? Dowd said that Congressman Pete Sessions (R-TX) is from Waco. Because Session's Congressional district is in Dallas, not Waco, Allison pounced.
In fact, Dowd was factually correct. Pete Sessions *is* from Waco. He was born there. When his own fact-checking failings were pointed out, Wick Allison weakly responded, "The convention is to identify elected officials by their constituency."
Wick Allison headlined his blog post, "Is That Clown From Dallas?" "Nah, He's From Waco." Wick Allison forgot a basic rule of blogging: don't call someone else a clown until you're sure who is the one wearing the big red nose.
Give Voters The Choice
Sharon Grigsby, commenting in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog about the newspaper's editorial in favor of giving Texas voters the choice of whether to allow gambling in Texas or not, was convinced by what I think is the weakest argument. She came around to the idea of letting voters decide as she learned, as Mike Hashimoto put it, how many "tax dollars leave Texas and are donated to state and local budgets elsewhere."
I remember, when I was growing up, when I wanted to do something stupid and used the old "Everyone else is doing it" argument on my parents, they would ask, "If everyone else is jumping off a cliff, does that mean you should do it, too?" No. The reason to allow gambling is not because everyone else is doing it, not because there's money to be made out of it, but because there's no public interest served in banning it. Louisiana, Oklahoma and other states license gambling today. Are life and morals there just as strong as in Texas? You betcha.
No comments:
Post a Comment