Opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks.

I hadn’t intended to write another post about blog-hatred, but the day after President Obama’s first State of the Union address it occurred to me that I had another reason for hating blogs. It seems to me that an awful lot of people aren’t able or willing to do their own thinking – they have to find their “opinions” in a blog or hear them on talk radio to make sure they’re in line with the party line.

At the same time that blogs and opportunities to post opinions have exploded, journalism and sources of actual news have started to evaporate. The oft-repeated claim by the right that journalism has a liberal bias seems to have given birth to the belief that if there is any bias (e.g. in choosing which story to cover), you may as well drop any attempt at neutrality and simply write op-eds (aka blogs) all the time. And the consuming public doesn’t seem to care that they’re no longer getting fact, just opinions. Doesn’t it seem ironic that we have so many people writing so much about so little?

As a country, we’re getting soft in the head! We used to be a nation of engineers and rocket scientists. We built things! We went to the moon! (Yeah, we developed the atomic bomb too – you can’t win them all.) Now you have to shout down the evangelicals who want to believe the earth is only 6,000 years old, and fight with Texas schools about teaching an alternative to evolution, not to mention people who think immunizations cause autism or who doubt global warming. Is it any wonder that people who don’t understand the scientific method can’t tell the difference between fact and opinion?

It doesn’t matter which end of the political spectrum they’re on – both ends do it. And there are plenty of ranting politicos willing to lead the sheep. And the direction they’re leading is away from the center, away from consensus or compromise. I often think lately that the true “conservatives” are the people who want gridlock. They’d much rather have a split government where neither side has a majority, nor can anything get done. In the meantime the sheep are following Rush Limbaugh or Lou Dobbs and can’t see that they’re helping deliver this very conservative agenda. But damn it, they know what they believe and they’re willing to fight for it!