Last week, I interviewed Andrew Breitbart for a feature on Wednesday's Culture Etc. page.

Below are excerpts (Parts I, II and III) from that interview.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

The following is excerpted from Robert Stacy McCain's recent interview with Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.com:
Q: Let's talk about Breitbart.com -- when did that start?
A: It started in 2005. I just always had a strong desire, as opposed to monitoring 25 to 30 Web sites to get the best AP national feed and the best UPI politics feed, and the best AFP world feed and countless others, my goal -- and it was a lofty one, and it seemed inconceivable that an individual could take on the major media -- but one by one, I've engaged in contractual relationships with the primary content providers.
Anyone who is paying attention to the world is going to have to use the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence-France Presse, UPI and the Press Association, and PR Newswire -- they're the major core news wires. In addition to that, I thought, why not start aggregating all the newspapers and Web sites into it, so it's searchable and to make it so you don't have to go to 50 sites. The two sites that are competing with me in terms of what I'm doing are Google and Yahoo -- and from looking at their stock prices, they're beating me. But I feel that it's like a feather in my cap, that after all these years that I've been online, having always felt like somewhat of an outsider in the media realm, that I have business relationships with the very entities that are larger than life and intimidating to me.
It's an exceptionally practical entity, Breitbart.com. I use it all day long, obsessively. I can just refresh one URL, as opposed to going to 25. On a self-esteem level, it's an achievement that perfectly reflects my interests and my aspirations. And [my goal is] to continue to grow that out and make it as useful a place for people to get information -- with me being the primary customer.
Q: Speaking of Breitbart.com, how many people do y'all employ?
A: Breitbart.com employs no one -- just me.
Q: OK, so you're a one-man operation?
A: Well, let's just say I contract out services. I don't have the technical prowess to put this stuff together, so I have tech partners, I have content partners, but Breitbart.com is my own offering.
And Breitbart.tv is a partnership that I have with Scott Baker and Liz Stephans, and they're going to be anchors and reporters for the site, in addition to being a video and audio news aggregation site.
We launched with an interview with [former Tennessee Sen.] Fred Thompson the day after the first [Republican presidential] debate at the Reagan Library. Scott Baker had the only on-air, on-camera, exclusive interview with Fred Thompson, when many thought he won [the debate] by virtue of not being up there. And people wanted to know, "Well, what does Fred Thompson have to say? And is Fred Thompson running?" Fred Thompson ended up choosing us to be his first and only interview of that type, and it was seen by over 100,000 people online. People dissected what he had to say, and it strengthened the perception that he's definitely going to run, it's just a matter of when he's going to announce. It was a primary sign that he was going to be using the nontraditional Internet media, versus the traditional media, to get his message out.
Q: Which he has done very effectively, when he responded to Michael Moore.
A: Which was a Breitbart.tv exclusive, and that's been seen by about ... 2 million people so far. So to say that was a bigger hit -- you know, an Internet hit -- that was exceptional. That one, the timing was the story. That he responded with a professional Web response to Michael Moore's salvo ...
Q: Within seven hours, I think, start to finish.
A: Unbelievable. It was awe-inspiring. ... It was a brilliant use of the media and what can happen. It starts off independently, and it goes out to the traditional and non-traditional media, as opposed to the other way around. ...
Q: What do you see being the impact of the New Media on 2008?
A: It seemed that 2000 and 2004, you saw where the Internet was important, yet peripheral -- an afterthought, to many. But now it's central to most. Hillary Clinton is right now using YouTube as a means to try and communicate to people that she's not as stiff as others think that she is -- making an appeal via YouTube to find out what song she wants for her campaign, in which she's mocking how she was caught on YouTube singing the national anthem out of tune, which shows a self-deprecating humor, which is exceptionally vital online.
Q: Why is that? ... A self-deprecating sense of humor, a sense of irony, seems so central to success online.
A: Well, a lot of it has to do with the demographic issue, has a lot to do with getting kids to relate to you. It's not that often that someone who comes across as a mother, maternal. ... Why would a 20-something vote for their mother, who's tsk-tsking their misbehavior? ... These people on YouTube are looking for things that make you realize, "I can relate to that person." It's hard to relate to an accomplished intellectual when you're a 22-year-old going to concerts every single night. It's not just policy.
Q: You've talked about Thompson, you've talked about Hillary. Any other candidates who really seem to get the Internet? I mean, Obama's doing pretty good.
A: I'm certainly not all-knowing. ... I think my value, as a thinker, is that I'm impervious to a certain degree to conventional wisdom. That doesn't mean that I'm always right. The more people tell me how successful Obama is on the Internet, I'm still not convinced of it. I haven't seen his use of the medium to any great result.
His success is born of the symbolism that he brings to the table more than anything, and that's something that's conveyed perfectly well on television. You see that he's seemingly, ostensibly conciliatory -- seems like the type of person that wants to convey that he can work and be genial with both sides.
When he castigated the Duke prosecutor [Durham, N.C., District Attorney Mike Nifong] for prosecutorial misjudgment, he was sending a message to white America, "I'm not Al Sharpton. I'm not a race-baiter. I will see your concerns as well." That didn't seem like an Internet phenomenon. ... So far I'm not seeing any evidence of his Internet prowess.
I think Thompson, right now, is far in the lead in terms of doing that, because he isn't spending a penny right now, and he's a player. And he's using the Internet to do so, while every other candidate is spending their nights and days trying to gobble up as much money as they can, which they can use to push their message, mostly in the traditional media. So Fred Thompson, to me, is the only one who's using the Internet exceptionally, because that's the way that he can run without running.
Q: And the future of online, the future of news organizations -- as a content provider, The Washington Times is working now very hard to get our stuff online. Instead of the one day, "It's Friday, here's Friday's paper online," we're updating [the Web site] continuously through the day. ...
A: Smart. That is a lesson that newspapers should have realized in 1995. ... I'm glad I don't have to work inside of a newspaper and try and figure out the financial aspects of all of this, and what this means to the bottom line, in regards of [classified] ads and print advertising versus the immediacy of online advertising, being able to click and that render a sale, and how that affects entire business models. That's not my burden.
I like the idea of information being immediate. And it's always my intention to find out what news is happening, even if it's not made public. ...
If you've got an exclusive, and you're holding it 'til midnight, and it's noon, you should be sweating those 12 hours in this environment. It's a different world.
I've never worked in a newsroom before, so I don't know, but from what I can tell from the journalists I know, their heads are spinning around, trying to make sense of it all. ...
In the old days, you had newspapers that would come out. You knew that the New York Times would come out at this time, you knew that the London papers would come out another time, it was almost like a steady diet -- breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now it's the healthier diet of eating little snacks throughout the entire day, and not having that big meal. ...
The rise of the cable news behemoth -- CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, similar type of programming, 24/7 -- to me, the problem with that 24/7 model is that MSNBC and Fox News rose to their current level of popularity around the dynamic of impeachment. Nine months of an O.J.-Simpson-like national saga that had a tug-of-war in which -- right-left, right-left, perfect crossfire, back-and-forth, back-and-forth -- and it was political theater, it was boxing, it was pristine entertainment. You can't do better than that programming.
As a result of that, a bunch of shows took the "Hannity & Colmes" model, took the "Crossfire" model -- point/counterpoint. Well, now that all those shows exist, and there is no impeachment, we're nine years after the fact, you've got this right-left thing going on. And I think that it has fed into the online, camp-oriented, DailyKos/FreeRepublic sort of thing. Bringing on a moderate to debate a moderate doesn't make sense. ... [The formation] of Internet camps, ideological camps where people go to the places where they feel comfortable, at the exact same time that on cable news you're watching people who, for all appearances, want to kill each other, going at it, has not particularly served this country well.
Because what a lot of people don't understand -- I was able to witness this during my education under Arianna's tutelage -- was that she could be going after a person in debate, she comes from a debate background, and she could be taking that person apart ... and then, a half-hour later, she's driving with that person in the car, and they'd have dinner at her house together. You don't get that perception on television. ...
What the audience doesn't get to see is these people can passionately disagree with each other but still afford them their human dignity and still be friends, because who cares if you disagree on welfare reform or immigration reform? We have the right to disagree with each other, and life's boring if everybody thinks the exact same thing.
So I think what's happened in the last 10 or so years of this stratification is that conviviality that existed behind the scenes by pundits who knew what their position was, to shake hands afterwards and have a cocktail or exchange phone numbers and maintain a civil friendship or professional relationship -- in 10-plus years, plus the Internet ghettos that people go to be comforted by their ideological brethren -- has made it so that the people who are pundits now are warriors, and don't have that "Hey let's get together after the show. ..."
That was one of my desires, after 2004, was to see if I could be involved in a project in which I disagreed mostly. ... The idea was, hey, news is news, opinion is opinion. And compelling writing and compelling debate is what I'm into. I know that I can hold my own around people I disgree with.
So I thought that the Huffington Post would be a great venue for the left to put their names -- you know, prominent members of the left -- to put their names next to their ideas, whereas at DailyKos and Democrats.org, people are using fake names ... then posting a diatribe calling for the president to swallow his entrails or something. So I think it's been successful in that regard, because whenever something happens significant politically, I want to know what the left is thinking. Arianna's created a site where you can almost recognize the consensus. ...
Q: I remember that when Arianna first went up that it was thought that her film friends would be posting their opinions -- that the Hollywood superstars, Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn ... would be posting on there, and that has not really happened as much as some people had thought. Can you talk about that?
A: I never thought that that which was going to make the Huffington Post work would be a steady stream of celebrities posting. I thought that it would be writers. Writers are what can sustain a good blog and a good Web site.
I think that celebrities did not expect that free speech is a two-way street, and that on the Internet, we can now talk back to them. And so when they preach that we get rid of our SUVs, those middle class out there who go to Costco with their three or four kids ... while they're flying in private jets -- I don't think that celebrities understood ... that putting out ideas that marginalize them from their core audience, that shows a sense of elitism, is probably not in their best interest.
I have seen celebrities on there, pretty big-time celebrities, and they're smart to convey their humanity in other forms other than political rhetoric.

The following is excerpted from Robert Stacy McCain's recent interview with Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.com:
Q: You're just constantly checking your e-mails for something new. ...
A: This is my secret URL that I created. Most people like to read news by category. And so the URLs are coded to go into the proper topic, the proper channel. That's not how I read news. I just like this free flow of news coming in, where I see every single headline from every single news wire. ...
Q: And they're coming in at the rate of three to four every minute. ...
A: Yeah, that's about right. I'd say a little more sometimes. ...
Q: You're getting Reuters, AP, UPI ...
A: AFP, Press Association -- the British newswire. You can look and see, AP sends out their top headlines. ... AP sends out to their editors their top stories.
The Associated Press is, to a huge degree, the conventional wisdom, because if you're watching CNN or Fox News, many people assume that there are people in those buildings who are making those determinations, but they're subscribing to AP and Reuters and filling in the spaces with their own original content. For the most part, this is a reliable place for an editor, at a cable news network, to say, "These are the top stories, so let's cover them, let's take their content, let's take their quotes and let's incorporate that into a package."
The good thing about the Internet is, you don't have to follow that conventional wisdom.
Q: You create your own news wire.
A: There are people who can go out there and become a creme brulee blog and obsess on creme brulee and have strong opinions on creme brulee, and which is the best type of creme brulee. They can fight against the creme caramelle people who don't have the hardened sugar top. And eventually, people who like creme brulee will migrate to this place and that person will become the creme brulee spokesperson. And then maybe a dessert company finds this person, says, "You know more about this than our president does," and hire them for $75,000 a year.
It seems that there's been, across the board, a democratizing of everything. It seems that the American spirit of freedom is being exported. In a MacLuhanesque way, the medium is the message. The freedoms that we see online in this country -- there's no taxation of it -- all these things have all benefitted from the growth of the Internet.
It's very difficult to sell to totalitarianism in the Internet age. Do you want a free Internet? Do you want absolute control of your Internet life, or do you want to put that in the control of others? And I think that if people were to start taking away your freedoms online, you'd see a bloody revolution.
Q: People would fight for their online freedom.
A: Right. To many people, it's everything. I think people take it for granted. I think people should be jumping up on top of their beds, thanking God every single day that this thing was invented.
I went from having a television Jones to the point where, I don't have it in me to be able to turn on television to watch regular programming. It's like, "Why would I go there? If I can be on the Internet?" And I can be a participant in this, and read and see what I want, and not let some executives tell me what to laugh at, and then lead me there with a laugh track. It just seems like the Internet is inherently smarter.
Q: It's a smart medium. It requires interactivity.
A: Right. And I think that, a lot of times, before the Internet, people ended their education when they graduated college. They stopped reading, that's when their assumptions would stop, and people would close their minds, and just go along with the rest of their lives.
Part of the Generation X thesis back in the '90s was political apathy. OK, well, that's a crazy notion now, to me, because the Internet has created an environment where you've got your DailyKos and your FreeRepublic and your Lucianne.com and your HuffingtonPost. Now, everyone seems to have an opinion, and a strong one, at that.
So we went from a period of raw apathy to hyperawareness of the political realm, without the mainstream media … covering that radical transformation. And the reason why is because, in the past, the old media wasn't doing its job. It bored people to tears. It was conventional wisdom for the sake of conventional wisdom, and because they were in control, they were happy with it, it was a profitable business for them. Well, the Internet has created a wonderful environment of competition for the powers that be. And now they're going to have to figure out how to give the people what they want. And the people want new information, they want fresh information, they want accurate information, they want unbiased information.
I think that in 10 to 15 years of the Internet, one thing that's for certain and absolutely, the New York, left-of-center tilt of the media had not been completely -- it was always the talk of the right wing -- but that notion is now self-evident. The Internet exposed who the reporters are. Before, people didn't know who the bylines were, now we know who they are. We know their histories. When they write something on Tuesday, we know what they said last Wednesday.
There's such a high level of accountability out there, that the very people who were criticizing the online world because there's not accountability, because there's no gatekeepers, because there's no editors, were in fact wrong. Errors were allowed to live an exceptional life in the Old Media without debunking. In the New Media, a lie cannot get out of the door before it's waylaid.
Q: You were talking about your ADD --
A: If it is in fact what I have -- and I don't have a strong medical background to be able to determine whether ADD is a legitimate disease. But am I like a lot of men and boys in the world, where my focus ... is a difficult thing to maintain?
I don't think every boy was meant to sit at a desk. I think that men were supposed to go out there and hunt and gather and be men, and not be emasculated, in front of a desk. ... I feel like, in an electronic sense, I am hunting and gathering. I'm out there on my own free range, doing what I want to do, how I want to do it, without somebody [supervising me]. ... That, for me, works well. I want to work. I want to be productive. The idea that I could do for a living that which I would do in my free time, for free, is the single greatest thing on the planet.
ADD, or whatever it is, was only a problem for me in that I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to be a productive citizen, working in a 50-story office building, working for the man. But it's not a problem when I'm able to be a functioning member of society, so it's an afterthought, it's not a problem. And I think that there are a lot of people like that.
Q: Let's talk about the history of how you became involved with Drudge. ...
A: I e-mailed him after reading his posting of what was a newsletter, basically, that he posted on the alt.news newsgroups. And I was just very interest in the subjects he was covering -- politics, box office, extreme weather. It just seemed like a more interesting take on the world than what I was seeing on the networks, and on the front pages, which was a predictable representation of a mundane truth. It was the first thing that I found online that I recall that I was passionate about seeing.
I thought that he was perhaps an operation of about 20 people. And when I found out that it was just one person, that we lived in the same town as one another, we became quick friends. And I became a strong supporter and ally of his vision.
Q: What year was that?
A: '95-ish, I think. ...
Q: Let's talk a little about politics. We recently had a panel where we brought in a lot of bloggers and other online people, and we talked about the perception that the Left has gotten more mileage out of the blogosphere, especially in the 2006 cycle. You got any take on that?
A: I think that's kind of conventional wisdom-y. The Left has recently figured out its place on the Internet. And it's less in reporting facts the mainstream media is ignoring -- because there is a simpatico sensibility between the left-wing blogosphere and the mainstream media, in terms of political hopes and aspirations. ...
The Right on the Internet is about an alternative stream of content and an alternative stream of ideas that comes to different situations and different stories from a completely different philosophical point of view. So there's a lot of original content that has opened up a lot of people's eyes who wouldn't see these ideas, but for the Internet and the freedom that exists out there to circumvent the traditional media and the traditional media biases.
The Left is not succeeding because it's creating more Left-friendly material, it is succeeding because it's mimicking the real-world traits that served the Left well in the '60s, and that's activism. It's not saying, "Here's an article and this is going to tell you new information, and give you a different vantage." No, this is, how to get a hundred people to vote who otherwise wouldn't be voting -- how to get people motivated. It's more of a tool to apply to rules of activism to the Internet.
It's sort of the [Joe] Trippi model. How to get people to donate money, and how to feel like they're involved. ... When you hear about the successes online of the Left, it's usually how one person was able to motivate [the 2006 Democratic primary campaign] to get Joe Lieberman out of office. It's isolating the act, and getting people to act on that. It's activism.
The Right, to me, online has been more about having a venue in which these ideas that you'd never find in the New York Times or The Washington Post can find their way online. How conservatives consume that is their own private thing.
Q: So it's not telling people, "Here, let's go to this meeting, let's sign this petition." It's more about, "Look, here's something you don't know."
A: It's about the constant stream. It's about connecting people out there who've not felt served by the traditional media's organization and ideological constraints. That's not to say that the Right doesn't have its activist tendencies on the Internet, but that's not the primary value of the Internet to the Right. The primary value of the Internet to the center-right is, here are ideas that, 10 or 15 years ago, you had to either subscribe to National Review or the Weekly Standard or to Commentary or to The Washington Times, to get an alternative. But you really had to actively pursue that stuff. Now, there are so many right-of-center venues. ...
Q: Last time we talked, we'd talked about you and Arianna Huffington. You're still friends, you and Arianna?
A: Yes, very good friends.
Q: And she went from Right to Left and has become sort of the diva, or the hostess --
A: The hostess of a very popular online salon that caters to the Left.
Q: Her original idea -- tell me how you helped her develop her site?
A: I think that she had the vision that the Internet was where the real action was going to be, and that running around getting your column in another dozen papers is a valuable way to spend your life, but that the real action is jumping online and seeing if you can swim -- and she did. I knew that she would be able to, because when I worked with her, I will credit her with this: She was the first person that convinced me that I could work. She put me to work and she taught me a lot. She's one of the most committed, determined people. ...
She's the most diligent, committed worker that I have ever been around. She, in a strange way, didn't allow for these tendencies of mine. ...
Arianna, for sure, offered absolute credibility and authority to her friends in Los Angeles, to her political allies in Washington who wanted to be involved in something on the Internet that would have an impact. She was the natural person to bring together some of the more prominent voices on the Left, who may have had power in the traditional media, but wanted a foray into the New Media.
Arianna has her political ideas, but she also has a strong sense of fun. She's part journalistic pitbull and she's part party-thrower. And that's a fun combination, especially for people of an activist bent. She's the type of person, you talk to her for 10 minutes and you say, "OK, let's go to war." ...
Q: The social networking -- you were talking about her throwing parties, knowing everyone in town.
A: Yeah, Arianna knows everyone. ... She's risen through the social and intellectual ranks everywhere she's gone. There's no one I know who's lived in London, New York, D.C. and L.A. and accumulated that level -- her Rolodex is made of titanium. It's unbelievable.
Q: You went to work for her in what year?
A: In '97. I worked for her from 1997 to '99 as her researcher -- ostensibly, to create Web sites for her, but I ended up becoming her researcher, which for me, was about gaining access to Lexis-Nexis, which was the greatest thing ever.
Q: Lexis-Nexis is a research tool that is far superior to just mere Googling.
A: Yes, though not as much as it was 10 years ago. In 1997, it felt like she handed me the keys to the kingdom, for an information addict. Now, if you do a search on Google, you'll find an archive of something within the last 10 to 15 years that you want. So Lexis-Nexis is grand, but it's not quite what it was at the point that she handed it to me as my primary work tool. To say that I fell in love with Lexis-Nexis is an understatement, and I think I wielded it fairly well. I started to figure out this thing, and I felt like I'm Mario Andretti and I've got the fastest car at the speedway. ...

CONTINUED

The following is excerpted from Robert Stacy McCain's recent interview with Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.com:
Question: You're how old?
Answer: 38.
Q: And how did you get into what you got into?
A: I graduated college in 1991 with no sense of my future whatsoever. The basic Generation X thesis totally applied to me -- sort of this wandering, "what's the future going to be like?" Remember when the book "Generation X" came out? Douglas Coupland's book? And simultaneously, the sort of Kurt Cobain anthem was like, what's our generation going to have to offer the world? Everything's been invented.
There was just a certain sort of hopelessness. And graduating into a bad economy in 1991 didn't help matters, and it's not as if academia -- I was sort of, you know, a typical of left-of-center college kid -- it's not as if the college's inculcating rah-rah, pro-American values.
So I came out [of college] a fairly cynical person. And I'd say my first four years out of college were spent mostly spinning my wheels, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I did some writing for a free magazine, I was a music editor, I worked for production companies, waited tables at the very, very beginning -- never had any mission whatsoever. ...
I have a friend named Seth Jacobson who went to Harvard, is an astrophysics major, and he said, "I need to talk to you. I'm going to come to your apartment and let's one a walk." And this is in Santa Monica, and it was about 1992. He said, "The future is the Internet." And he gave me this long, impassioned talk about how my mind, which is manifestly ADD-addled, perfectly fits the way that the Internet works. And he started talking about hypertext markup language and, say, you could be reading an article -- I was always a newshound -- and you wanted to see something more on something, it could take you in, and you could end up hyperfocusing on something you want, which is what ADD people do.
And I just remember hearing what he had to say, and it felt kind of absurd. Like, "OK, well, I don't really understand what, precisely, you're saying, but I'll store it away." It was about a year-and-a-half later, that I was in Austin, Texas, for a bizarre one-year experiment --
Q: Doing what?
A: Writing. I was still doing the music editor thing for this magazine called Venice Magazine, but I wanted to see, I wanted to go to shows. I was just covering the national and international music scene. And I thought, having spent so many years in New Orleans, seeing great shows in great venues, that the Los Angeles music scene was just so depressing -- seeing bands that didn't seem too enthralled to be onstage at the Roxy, because they knew that they were performing for music execs with comp tickets, who were just sitting in the back with their arms folded. I was just young and excited, to rock out, sort of thing.
So I was down there and I started reading about the Internet. I had AOL at the time [about 1993]. ... But to be able to be given sports scores, and to be able to make an online reservation. ... It was neat, but it wasn't the Internet. It wasn't being able to ... be a participant in the media, AOL didn't give you that really strong experience. And I got, somehow, a seed sprouted in my head. I go, "I've got to get on this Internet thing."
It took me so long. I remember I went out to a place called Luminati.net -- they were kind of a well-known Internet service provider -- and I went up to, almost like a garage, and knocked on the side of a door, and there were a whole bunch of servers there. And I said, "I want to be a subscriber," and they handed me a disc and a manual on how to get online. I tried it for about a week and I couldn't get online. Finally, I said, "Look, I'm going to go to Central Market, I'm going to buy a six-pack of my favorite beer, and I'm going to pretend like this is a first date, and I'm just going to work this thing until I get her to bed." And I spent all night, and I finally logged on, and I had Mosaic, I had Gopher. ... I started clicking onto folders and seeing all this interesting stuff, and I felt like I was mischievously investigating a world that nobody else knew about.
I would say that was the day my life and my career began. Logging onto the Internet -- everything before seemed cloudy, and simply the pursuit of happiness was just, "Let's go to another band. Let's go to another movie." I was just a classic pop consumer.
The Internet was like an awakening for me. I sleepwalked and drove drunk through college. I mean, when I wasn't sleeping, I was drinking, and I was not remotely invigorated by the academic experience. Getting online and having access to all the information I want, all the newswires, all the historical information that I could possibly want, has made me, in hindsight, be very regretful of having treated college the way I did. I wish I'd had the Internet at the time.
I look at the Internet -- to me, it's as close to a panacea as one can get. There's something for everybody. ...
There's an ironic twist to the fact that Kurt Cobain killed himself in large part due to his cynicism as a human being, and he talked about how his generation really didn't have anything new to offer. It feels that, within that period of him dying, within a very soon period, the Internet became a prevalent part of our lives, that every single day has grown exponentially.
Generation X, which used to create nihilistic art, now is involved in the transformation of communications. When people would talk about the global community 15 years ago, it was a bizarre abstract. .... Even when I'd travel over to Europe, I'd pick up the International Herald Tribune and I'd get the sports scores from two days before. So I always felt there was a huge disconnect between here and there, here and everywhere. The Internet has created raw immediacy and raw connectedness to anything and everything.
It seems that if you've ever felt constrained by the bureaucracies of the world -- whether it be government or corporations -- it seems that now any individual can do anything that they set their mind to. A person can create a Web site that looks as if it's a multinational corporation. You can go to GM.com or you can go to MG's blog, and MG's blog is 10 times more compelling. You can pretty much do anything. You can start your own T-shirt company, you can cultivate an audience, you can create a business from scratch. ....
I think we take for granted how great it is. And I don't, I really don't. Every single day, I'm thankful for the opportunity to not have to work in an office building.
Q: You talk about ADD, and people may think you're joking. You were diagnosed?
A: In Austin, Texas. And this psychiatrist said to me, you don't have to come back for the follow-up test, because this is the biggest no-brainer I've ever seen.
I remember thinking at the time, I've really got a problem here and I need to figure it out, because I can't sit straight, I can't concentrate on anything. I was always like that. I couldn't believe that I made my way through prep school and college without really paying attention to anything. It was my wits and my sense of humor that really got me around it -- tools that allowed me to circumvent the system.
The Internet for me has been that answer. I realize that my entire brain was meant to be connected to the Internet. It is my Ritalin. ... I don't feel that I have a disease now. I really don't. I'm like, "Oh, finally the device has been invented." That's why I call it a panacea. The Internet is the greatest single invention, to me, ever.
Every technological innovation -- from instant messaging, to e-mail, to World Wide Web. ...
I'm a news addict, news aficionado who, instead of watching "Sesame Street" growing up, would watch the local news. And I'd watch the 4:30 news, then I'd watch the 5 o'clock news, then I'd watch the 6 o'clock news, then I'd watch the national news at 6:30. I'd usually see the same story conveyed, in the same manner, at least three or four times. I was such a voracious news consumer.
The idea now, on the Internet, that I can read everything that's being read inside the major newsrooms in the country -- I'd pay top dollar for that, back in the day. And now it's all there.
You know that you're seeing the same exact information that the Dan Rathers, the Peter Jennings, the Tom Brokaws of the world are seeing. You're like, "Wait a second. Why did you choose that to be the No. 1 story?" And you start gaining a level of confidence that there's a conventional wisdom out there, set by people with a very parochial sensibility. Given that anything's possible on the Internet, you kind of feel motivated to say, "Let me have my say on this. Let me try and counteract the effect of there being a machinery that creates conventional wisdom without taking into consideration alternative viewpoints." ...

CONTINUED

Does a university policy against harassment infringe on students' rights to free speech? That's the question raised by a case in Massachusetts:

A campus magazine at Tufts University has been found guilty of "harassment" by a disciplinary board, a decision that could establish "a terrifying precedent," according to an academic freedom group.

The Primary Source, a conservative monthly published by Tufts students, commemorated "Islamic Awareness Week" last month on the Medford, Mass., campus with a full-page "supplement" headlined "Islam -- Arabic Translation: Submission," that cited facts about Muslim history.

That unsigned article, along with a satirical "Christmas carol" in the magazine's December issue mocking the university's affirmative-action program, was cited as a violation of Tufts' "nondiscrimination policy." ...

Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), said the magazine's article about Islam was "one-sided," but warned that the Tufts ruling endangers students' rights to free speech.

"The students were responding to what they thought was a one-sided and overly rosy depiction of Islam during Islamic Awareness Week," the FIRE official said. ...

The panel's decision "appeared not even to raise the issue of whether or not the statements ... were true, but turned only on how they made people feel," Mr. Lukianoff said.

I attended a long, grueling show trial -- the kind of show trial that doubtless will be repeated at campuses across the United States. ...
The show trial was closed to outside media; I was only present because members of The Primary Source editorial board asked if I would give a closing statement on their behalf.

And a show trial it was. The room was filled to capacity with Dennis and MSA allies, who cheered, on cue, for Dennis and his MSA compatriot, Shirwac Mohamed. Dennis and Mohamed called witness after witness to complain of emotional distress: a lesbian student who whined that The Source opposed the homosexual agenda; a black female student who complained that she had -- horror of horrors! -- been engaged in a dialogue about the carol during one of her classes; a member of the MSA who carped that the quotes from the Koran were not placed "in context." Not one witness showed documented evidence of psychological harm.

And the CSL swallowed this gibberish whole.

I'm not as easily intimidated as some touchy-feely tenured professors and their darling little leftists in the student body. So I'm going to republish the purely factual advertisement here that caused the thought-police to respond so aggressively, with a little message to the easily aggrieved at Tufts.

Tufts University? Fatwa this.

Remind me about this next year too. I would so love to re-run this when it's "Islamic Awareness Week".

Naughty liberal faculties who love to crush dissent are nothing new, but they certainly have come a long way, baby, since the 80's, anyway. Fortunately, now with new media, there are a great many more voices willing to push back.

Lovely: Harsh criticism of Islam doesn't -- in the Committee's view -- "promot[e] political or social discourse." Rather, it is an "unreasonable attack" (and it's up to the Committee to decide which attacks on religions are reasonable and which aren't).

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor

Cheryl Wetzstein interviews David Blankenhorn, author of "The Future of Marriage":

In fact, he says, researchers have identified at least 24 negative consequences of legalizing same-sex "marriage," virtually all of which relate to how it changes the institutional aspects of marriage.

What's at stake with same-sex "marriage" is that it reinforces the "deinstitutionalization" -- the weakening or overturning of customary forms -- of marriage for everyone, Mr. Blankenhorn says, adding that some people support same-sex "marriage" precisely because they approve of such a deinstitutionalization.

Marriage is already battered, he says, noting that many left-leaning academics and intellectuals -- since Marxist theorist Frederick Engels more than 120 years ago -- have labeled it "a failed and dangerous institution." More than a few contemporary researchers predict that marriage is inexorably evolving into diverse family forms. Meanwhile, many American men and women are already living lifestyles that disconnect marriage from sex and childbearing.

This disconnection of marriage from sex and childbearing is part of the "contraceptive culture" addressed by Allan Carlson in the latest issue of Touchstone magazine, tracing the history of Protestant views on contraception:

The key figure in developing a Protestant family ethic was Martin Luther. ... The first element in Luther's Protestant family ethic was a broad celebration not simply of marriage but of procreation.

For Luther, God's words in Genesis 1:28, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth," were more than a blessing, even more than a command. They were, he declared in his 1521 treatise on The Estate of Marriage, "a divine ordinance which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore." ...

Marriage with the expectation of children was also a spiritual expression. Luther saw procreation as the very essence of the human life in Eden before the Fall. As he wrote in his Commentary on Genesis:

[T]ruly in all nature there was no activity more excellent and more admirable than procreation. After the proclamation of the name of God it is the most important activity Adam and Eve in the State of innocence could carry on -- as free from sin in doing this as they were in praising God.

The fall of Adam and Eve into sin interrupted this pure, exuberant potential fertility. Even so, the German Reformer praised each conception of a new child as an act of "wonderment . . . wholly beyond our understanding," a miracle bearing the "lovely music of nature," a faint reminder of life before the Fall ....

At the astonishing and deeply disturbing 1961 North American Conference on Church and Family, sponsored by the National Council of Churches ... population-control advocate Lester Kirkendall argued that America had "entered a sexual economy of abundance" where contraception would allow unrestrained sexual experimentation.

Wardell Pomeroy of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research explained how the new science of sexology required the abandonment of all old moral categories. Psychologist Evelyn Hooker celebrated the sterile lives of homosexuals. Planned Parenthood's Mary Calderone made the case for universal contraceptive use, while colleague Alan Guttmacher urged the reform of America's "mean-spirited" anti-abortion laws.

But in recent years, Mr. Carlson notes, some Protestants have reconsidered the sterile ideas of the late 20th century:

"It is clear that there is a major rethinking going on among Evangelicals on this issue, especially among young people," R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently told the Chicago Tribune. "There is a real push back against the contraceptive culture now."

In his last years, Francis Schaeffer seemed to be moving toward the historic Christian view of contraception. Since 1980, several resolutions adopted by the Southern Baptists at their annual meeting have criticized contraception. By the close of the twentieth century, the Family Research Council featured special reports on "The Empty Promise of Contraception" and "The Bipartisan Blunder of Title X," the latter referring to the domestic contraception program in the United States.

1. Mali (7.38 TFR)
2. Niger (7.37 TFR)
3. Uganda (6.84 TFR)
4. Somalia (6.68 TFR)
5. Afghanistan (6.64 TFR)

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor

The American taxpayers got their money's worth in Tuesday's Jefferson Lecture at the Warner Theatre, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Harvard University political science professor Harvey Mansfield, author most recently of "Manliness," delivered a dazzling display of erudition worth every cent of the $10,000 NEH honorarium.

Mr. Mansfield's lecture was entitled "How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science," and his arguments were subtle, complex and wide-ranging. He cited such sources as Plato, Aristotle, Homer's "Illiad," Tocqueville and Lyle Lovett.

Yes, that Lyle Lovett, the country singer whose marriage (1993-95) to Julia Roberts was an inspiration to ugly guys around the world.

Mr. Mansfield was referring to thumos -- a Greek term for "animal spirit" that can also be translated as "passion" -- and its importance to politics when he had cause to discuss the poetic brilliance of the Texas-born Mr. Lovett:

For how can you have a politics of identity or of meaning without using the names that go with identity and meaning? Lyle Lovett has a song, "You're Not From Texas" that ends like this: "That's right, you're not from Texas, but Texas wants you anyway." Lyle teaches us the central problem of multiculturalism: If it's so important to come from Texas, how can Texas want you if you're not? Those of us not from Texas have to live with the shame of it, rather doubtful that Texas us wants us anyway. For with honor goes the shame of dishonor.

Just before the lecture began, I found myself standing in line with another reporter at the Starbucks across the street from the Warner. The reporter, employed by another newspaper, noticed I was reading the advance copy of Mr. Mansfield's lecture (the full text is online here) provided to the press. We talked briefly and I remarked on the Lyle Lovett reference.

The other reporter confessed he did not get Mr. Mansfield's point. But ... he's not from Texas.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

Some activists say being pro-environment means you must be anti-baby, as the Times of London reports:

Having large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a 4x4 car and failing to reuse plastic bags, according to a report to be published tomorrow by a green think tank.

The paper by the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family's carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.
John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet.

"The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child."

My wife and I have six wonderful children. Our youngest is a 4-year-old girl who -- like all 4-year-old girls -- wants a baby sister. Maybe I can talk my wife into trying for another baby, if only to protest the anti-human nonsense promoted by the Optimum Population Trust.

One popular pro-life bumper stickers says, "Save the baby humans." For the benefit of Professor Guillebaud and his baby-hating friends, I'll borrow a phrase from a popular gun-rights bumper sticker:

They can have my babies when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston of HotAir.com sat down last week to be interviewed for an hour by editors and reporters from The Washington Times. Excerpts of the interview will appear on Tuesday's Culture, Etc. page, and are now online in three segments (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

Enjoy -- and feel free to comment, but please remember: Comments are moderated.

-- David Eldridge, managing editor, WashingtonTimes.com

UPDATE / 9:19 p.m.:

Don Surber of the Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail links:

Malkin explains the addiction that keeps her busy in the middle of the night.

That's in reference to the confession in Part I:

I confess -- I am a full blog junkie. ... I'd been a blog reader since after 9/11 -- really, actually, before 9/11, I'd read Mickey Kaus' blog and Instapundit in the early days. ... But after I jumped into it feet first, it's not something you can turn off. You do it in the middle of the night.

UPDATE / 9:53 p.m.:

James Joyner takes issue with Mrs. Malkin's remarks about immigration as a national security issue:

The conflation of the illegal immigration and terrorism issues is problematic. ... Certainly, the 9/11 hijackers didn't wade across the Rio Grande and then ride to Logan Airport in the trunk of a car.

Whatever one thinks of fruit pickers and poultry factory workers sending money home to Mexico, they're not a terrorist threat. It's hard to feed yourself, send money to support your family back home, and foment terrorism on $2.50 an hour.

Well, James is an Army veteran, so I'll let him defend himself on that one.

-- RSM

Third of a three-part, edited transcript of a Wednesday interview by editors and reporters of The Washington Times with syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston, executive producer of HotAir.com:

Mr. Eldridge: On May 17, The Washington Times celebrates its 25th anniversary. What does The Times represent to you as a voracious news consumer, as a person who has built her career commenting on the news?

Mrs. Malkin: Well, first of all, congratulations. It's a remarkable achievement. There's always a lot of backpatting among the blogosphere for being the information revolutionaries, but The Washington Times -- when you talk about founding fathers, especially when you're talking about alternatives to the liberal elite -- and I've been a part of the commentary galaxy at The Washington Times for several years, and I owe a lot in terms of mentorship to the people who've been involved with the editorial and opinion pages.
We mentioned Warren T. Brookes [a columnist for The Times who died in 1991] and he's been a role model for me, and ought to be a role model for many more journalists who are conservative and who, particularly, get into the opinion side. Because I think what he represented for a lot of people was a breakthrough on op-ed pages, of someone who did more than just navel-gaze, he put the investigative work into it, absolutely, and let the numbers speak for themselves. And I think he showed that you could have this hybrid of someone who was an opinion columnist but also a journalist of the first order. And I think that for people in the conservative movement who aspire to be opinion leaders, that to have that training and that background, it's very important.
On the news side, too, The Washington Times has had a major impact on politics, reporting and providing that "fair and balanced" perspective before Fox coined that phrase ...

Mr. McCain: You went to Iraq. You've been a critic of the media coverage. What is the media missing about Iraq?

Mrs. Malkin: Well, part of our motivation -- just to provide context -- was to look into a story that the Associated Press had first reported, around Thanksgiving. And all you have to do is Google "Jamil Hussein" and you know what I'm talking about.

Mr. McCain: Police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

Mrs. Malkin: That's right. But I think that what part of our journey showed was that you don't have to be some deep-pocketed, credentialed-by-the-journalistic-Sorbonne member of the media to go over there and see for yourself what exactly is happening there. And I think we have just gotten so sick of the daily death toll, IED explosion of the day type reporting, that we have used both our sites, both my site and Hot Air, to provide that balance.
I think that the embed program is such a great innovation. More citizen-journalists should use it. ... Jeff Emanuel of RedState is over there. We've seen a lot more bloggers on the right than on the left go over there. There are very few obstacles to approaching MNFI and applying for an embed and getting over there, but all these people who use the "chickenhawk" argument on the left, I haven't seen them signing up. You know, they're always sending us e-mails every day, "Why don't you sign up? Why don't you go over there?" Uh, been there.

Mr. Preston: And I did serve in the military.

Mrs. Malkin: Yes, and Bryan was in the Air Force. We would love to go back --

Mr. Preston: Yeah, we sure would.

Mrs. Malkin: For a longer period. But in the interim, I think listening to milbloggers reporting from the front is a far better way of getting informed than, say, listening to what Katie Couric or Charlie Gibson has to say.

Mr. DeBose: Where did you go in Iraq?

Mrs. Malkin: Northwest Baghdad. We were in the Khadamiyah neighborhood, and we embedded on the base where Saddam was hung.

Mr. Preston: About a week before we got there.

Mr. DeBose: The news focus is almost exclusively on Baghdad. And it also appears that is where most of the violence is occurring. But what I don't hear is what's going on -- I mean, Iraq is about the size of California. That's like covering Los Angeles by itself -- as if the other parts of the country don't exist. And I'm trying to find out why news sources are not looking at these other places in the country where, I don't know if everything is fine, but --

Mrs. Malkin: Well, you know, it's that age old impetus of putting -- what bleeds, leads. And what you say of Iraq is true of Baghdad, too. I mean on the day that we got there, the Haifa Street siege was taking place, and our unit came and picked us up in armored Humvees, and we drove right past Haifa Street. And then we drove right into our neighborhood, which was completely pacified. Obviously, we still had to wear helmets and body armor, but we didn't need the [security] contingent that [Arizona Sen. John] McCain got ridiculed for. And you know, we went through the markets, we were on dismounted patrols. They don't follow the curfew there at night.
It's a separate question about how it got pacified, but the fact is there are some safe places in Baghdad. But you rarely hear about them. It's all about wanting to report the bloodiest moments of the day, rather than the boring parts of reconstruction or civilian affairs officers sipping tea.

Mr. Preston: Or giving soccer balls out to kids, that sort of thing. We ran into reporters who looked at the pacified area that we were in and didn't report it. But then he showed up later on in Ghazaliya, which is one of the worst parts of town. Heard a lot of reports there -- brilliant reports, factual as far as we know, but there's a selection bias, just by what he chose to report and what he chose not to report. ...

Mrs. Malkin: And what the critics will say is, "Oh, well, you're just serving as propagandists for the Bush administration, doing all the touchy-feely stories," instead of seeing that that is part of counter-insurgency success. ...

Mr. McCain: You just mentioned your being accused of being a cheerleader for the Bush administration. Immigration -- you have been harshly critical of President Bush's immigration policy. Why?

Mrs. Malkin: Because his policy is open borders, and I think it runs exactly contrary to the lip service he pays to homeland security. And I would say that his tenure has been as bad or possibly worse than Clinton's or anyone's preceding him. And he is vigorously pushing an amnesty that will make the 1986 amnesty look like nothing. He's holding hands with Congressiional Hispanic Caucus and the libertarian open-borders lobbyists who want to see this happen, and apparently he doesn't buy his own rhetoric that homeland security starts with border security.
He goes and does these dog-and-pony shows down at the border that tout drones, and then, at the same time looks the other way where his own Treasury Department allows [illegal aliens to send] billions of dollars of remittances back to Mexico. There's no incentive there for Mexico to improve its economy, for them to improve conditions so people don't have to risk their lives going through the desert to get here to be able to support their families.
And then we haven't even started to talk about the national security implications of granting another mass amnesty. We already know for a fact that there have been dozens of al-Qaeda operatives who've been able to stay in this country over the last several years, some of whom took advantage of these very kind of amnesty programs -- we talked about this when you interviewed me for "Invasion." Things have only gotten worse now. When was that -- 2002? Five years ago? ...

Mr. Eldridge: Is there a conservative movement in America and what is it, and who leads it?

Mrs. Malkin: I don't know that there is any one, unitary movement. I certainly know different niche movements. There's certainly a grassroots immigration-enforcement movement. I mean, I think we have a narrow view when we think of, well, which Washington groups and leaders are leading this movement, but out in the Southwest, for example, you have a lot of these immigration-enforcement activists who don't have puppet strings from Washington.
But a lot of people don't remember, in that last mid-term election, there were four anti-illegal immigration initiatives that passed overwhelmingly in Arizona, and those are certainly ignored by the open-borders editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal, who claimed that the mid-term elections were a rebuke of immigration enforcement. ... I guess in the rarefied Manhattan air of the Wall Street Journal offices, they have a very funny view of what the elections were all about. ...
There's one other niche movement that I want to talk about that has been electorally successful, and that's sort of been under the radar screen, and that's Ward Connerly and the civil rights initiatives. Almost nobody paid attention to over the last week, he launched four more of these initiatives. And remember even while ... the Republicans got spanked during the mid-terms, but he did fabulously. He was rebuked by the Michigan Republicans, remember --

Mr. DeBose: Yeah, he's getting no support anywhere.

Mrs. Malkin: Except for the vast majority of voters, everytime these initiatives go on the ballot.

Mr. Preston: Amazing how that works.

Mrs. Malkin: Yeah, I was in California when he did the first one and I was in Washington [state] when he did Initiative 200, and I worked for the Seattle Times at the time. And Frank Blethen, who's the publisher of that paper -- a total left-wing[er], who had thrown everything against that -- the entire liberal establishment and the corporate establishment opposed that thing and it still won. And that's in far-left Seattle, it won. And [Mr. Connerly] will win again, and he'll be rebuked again by the Republicans, and they will not learn.

Mr. DeBose: On [California Proposition] 209, the only credible argument against it, which was never argued, was that it hurt white women more than it did anyone else. And if no one is going to argue about that, why is it then that Republicans don't want to touch that issue?

Mrs. Malkin: Because they're cowards. They're moral cowards. They don't want to be seen as going against the race mongers on the left, and they didn't want to be in the battlefield and slog it out. And also, I think, they didn't believe in it. ...
I mean, it's so much easier just to pay off these affirmative action groups than to fight on principle. But obviously, Ward Connerly has the backing of the grassroots conservative movement. ... Obviously, he appeals to the majority of the people. ...

Mr. McCain: Rush Limbaugh has said that, if he started talking about media bias, he'd never talk about anything but media bias. [...] Is it ever going to change?

Mrs. Malkin: I guess I just don't have that kind of defeatist attitude. You know, the great thing about having a blog -- or two blogs, for that matter, both text and video -- is that you can keep at it, and you have a limitless amount of space to expose both sins of omission and sins of commission. And we are having successes, and it's not just Rathergate. Everyone keeps going back to that focal point.
But just look at last year and the entire right-side of the blogosphere's work on the "fauxtography" scandal during Israel's Hezbollah conflict -- it had a major impact. Every time I look at that "picture kill" on screen shot, I think, "Yeah, you're right we had an effect on that. You're right we should keep doing that, and keep hammering at it, because it does make a difference."
I don't like this idea of people who roll their eyes and say, "Oh, why do you complain about media bias?" Because how we get our information, and what is said, particularly about the war, is so important. And we saw the impact that that has on those soldiers in the field. And it's not just a matter of parlor games or doing it because it's some sort of vacuous intellectual exercise -- you know, it has an impact on people's lives.

Mr. Preston: It's not just a "gotcha" game.

Mrs. Malkin: And I think that drives a lot of what we do at Hot Air, in particular.

Mr. Preston: Like that AP story, where we stood in front of the mosque that the AP said had been blown up. ... Actually, the most important part of the story, which kind of got lost in everything, was that story was a smear of the Iraqi army. And we're trying to get the Iraqi army to stand up and work on its own, and to be able to function. And that story smeared the Iraqi army by alleging that they stood by while some Shia burned some Sunni -- dragged him out of a mosque and burned him. That didn't happen. The Iraqi army actually did what it's supposed to do in that incident. So you have to combat this stuff.

Mr. McCain: OK, final question. A few weeks ago, Matt Drudge, on his radio show, took kind of a shot at you. Is there some kind of a feud between Malkin and Drudge? Is there something going on there that inquiring minds should know about?

Mrs. Malkin: Here's how I'm going to respond, OK? We love what we do at Hot Air. We have a lot of fun doing it. I think that's obvious to our readers, our viewers, and we've had a lot of amazing stories that we've covered over the last year.
I'm very fortunate to have the team I work with and Bryan, in particular, and I have been everywhere from the Gathering of Eagles march to interviewing Doolittle's Raid survivors to going to Iraq to filming cheerleader routines in your backyard. And guess what? We're providing something that people want to see.
And if there are detractors who have a problem with that, guess what? They don't have to click on Hot Air and they certainly don't have to click on the "play" button.

Second of a three-part, edited transcript of a Wednesday interview by editors and reporters of The Washington Times with syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston, executive producer of HotAir.com:

Mr. McCain: What do you think about the situation with Don Imus?

Mrs. Malkin: I think it was coming to him. He had it coming to him. I don't have any sympathy for him, but you know, the whole debacle exposed a lot of hypocrisy everywhere. I certainly didn't like to see all the Nervous Nellying among some of the radio talk show hosts who were decrying critics of Imus. But, you know, the column I'd written the week that it all came out highlighted all of the disgusting stuff that's on the Billboard Hot Rap Tracks every week and that stuff is still going on. I understand that the NAACP just declared the death of the "n-word" -- that hasn't gotten around to the hip-hop world, not the last time I turned on the radio.

Brian DeBose, national reporter: The rap issue has been out there for quite some time. I think people have forgot about Dolores Tucker and Dionne Warwick -- obviously, Tipper Gore in the '80s who sort of highlighted this, and at that time, it was moving in that direction. And it sort of got ignored and in the '90s, it sort of fell off the table. The misogyny was there, the vulgarity. But I wanted to ask you, why is it that people are not discussing this journey that has taken place, and then all of a sudden, Don Imus says something and everyone's talking about it?

Mrs. Malkin: I guess I disagree with the premise, because someone like Bill O'Reilly has been doing it all along, you know, with his challenge of Ludacris, and a lot of social conservatives have never forgotten it. It's not like it dropped off the radar screen. It's just that I think the Imus thing really just brought to light that this cancer has been metastasizing for so long, and it's not from nowhere that Don Imus felt like that it would be perfectly acceptable to say the things that he did. I mean, he hears it all the time, probably, and figured, "Well, why not me?"

Audrey Hudson, national reporter: Who should replace Rosie O'Donnell [on ABC's "The View"], and when Elizabeth [Hasselbeck] goes on maternity leave, will you audition?

Mrs. Malkin: I just blogged today about Roseanne Barr -- I think she's going to be a perfect match to sit in Rosie's chair, figuratively. She's anti-Mormon, anti-Israel, pro-conspiracy theory -- check, check, check. I don't even know that they would replace Elizabeth while she's gone. Well, they never did replace Starr [Jones]. Maybe by attrition, all we'll be left with are Barbara [Walters] and Joy [Behar]. Oh, me? No way. I don't need that kind of headache.

Mr. Eldridge: You wouldn't be interested in any kind of TV gig like that at all?

Mrs. Malkin: No. No.

Mr. McCain: A lot of people online ask you, will you do your own show? And I know you, in the past, have said no.

Mrs. Hudson: Well, you've got your own show.

Mrs. Malkin: Yeah, I do, it's called "Vent" -- I'm on there, at HotAir.com. The videoblog has been such a great adventure. We just celebrated our one-year anniversary, and there are things we do there that we couldn't possibly do on cable news, let alone ...

Mr. Eldridge: Like your cheerleading routine.

Mrs. Malkin: Yeah, exactly.

Mr. McCain: You've been a harsh critic of the "Girls Gone Wild" culture, and also of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. How does that fit in as a part of the incivility we see so much in contemporary culture?

Mrs. Malkin: I think the cheapening of women in society has everything to do with incivility in the culture, and I'm glad that these liberal women bloggers are seeing that now. I wish that they would see that a lot of that incivility has been directed at conservative women. And I wish that they were more outspoken, not only about the domestic "Girls Gone Wild" situation, but also about the role of women being oppressed around the world. We talk about that a lot, at my blog and at Hot Air. I know I'm going all over the place, but it is all of a piece.
I posted a video that is on YouTube now of one of the Iranian women being dragged by the mullah police into a car because she wasn't covered properly. You never hear feminist decrying what's going on there. No, what you get is Rosie O'Donnell being an apologist for Ahmahdinejad, and Sheryl Crow lecturing us about how big our toilet-paper squares should be.
I guess there are people who think that these things are contradictory. On the one hand, decrying the situation being policed for not being modest enough and then, at the same time, worrying about immodesty in American culture. I don't think those things are contradictory. It is all about freedom and choice, and in the case of criticizing the "Girls Gone Wild" culture, I'm saying that parents should be directing more of their own personal responsibility and urging young women to make the right choices.
I don't think we do enough of that. And, actually, I just finished doing a lecture at St. Louis University on this, and we talked about the "Girls Gone Wild" culture. On the one hand, you have Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and on the other hand, you have hip-hop culture, and I think the confluence of those things is very dangerous and poisonous.
I have a 6-and-a-half-year-old daughter and I look at this stuff. She cannot watch me on O'Reilly anymore, because even in primetime on Fox, the stuff that they show -- during the family hour -- I can't have her watch me on TV. It's gotten that bad.

Mr. McCain: I saw you on ["The O'Reilly Factor"] with [Malik Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party] -- he called you a prostitute to your face. Was he on the set with you?

Mrs. Malkin: No, no. He was in D.C., I was in New York. We'd had a run-in with him before because we were at the Danish Embassy last February ... I think that's why he had such a chip on his shoulder.

Mr. DeBose: I've known him since he came out of Howard [University] and he ran for City Council here. And then, miraculously, he got involved with the Black Panther Party. I thought that was strange at the time, but then he took it to place that I never thought that he was going to go. I ended up having to stop associating with him. He's angry about something that I don't think he's aware of. And I think it's just, he wants this notoriety. And people bring him on [television], and I'm like, "Well, you're on there -- what are you still angry about?"

Mr. Preston: It's not like you're being suppressed, you're on O'Reilly, the top-rated cable show.

Mrs. Malkin: Well, that was his last appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor." On the Monday after that show, [Mr. O'Reilly] gave a statement. He said he was not going to have him on, and that in any case, [Mr. Shabazz] was a fringe character and a radical, and he didn't really represent anyone.
And I strongly disagree with that, because you know what? There is a large constituency of people who have that exact same opinion. He was just -- he had the [courage] to say it to my face. At least I give him credit for that.
But you know, I come across this notion that somehow I must be a prostitute for the white man because the views that I espouse, and there's no other reason, then I must be getting paid, that I would say anything I say.

Mr. DeBose: We've gotten into it with me working here.

Mrs. Malkin: I'm sure. So you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Mr. Preston: One of the big accusations that's leveled at her all the time is that she's a puppet for somebody, and I got to tell you, anybody that tries to make a puppet out of her is going to have a stump for an arm. It's not going to work.

This is an edited transcript of a Wednesday interview by editors and reporters of The Washington Times with syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston, executive producer of HotAir.com:

Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor: Liberal bloggers have claimed credit for the Democrats' victory in the 2006 elections, and most observers agree that Democrats have done much better at working with bloggers. Why is that?

Mrs. Malkin: That's a good question. I think there's no question that the left-wing blogosphere had a huge impact on the mid-term campaign. But their No. 1 candidate, [Connecticut Democrat] Ned Lamont, lost. And they certainly can't claim victory for all those [conservative] Blue Dog Democrats who ran to the right of many of the Republicans who lost. So, I think there's certainly a perception that they're very powerful. In practice, I don't know. I don't know how much influence they truly wield.
I do agree that a lot of the Democratic leadership has done a better job than the Republicans have of pandering to the netroots, but look what that got [former North Carolina Sen.] John Edwards. Two of the nuttiest, most vulgar bloggers in the left-wing blogosphere insinuated themselves into that campaign, and no one thought to stop that until it caused him a huge heartache and embarrassment. And, obviously, even now, a lot of these Democrats haven't learned.
Just last week, [New York Sen.] Hillary Clinton was blogging for another of the most vile, hate-filled sites, FireDogLake. Here she is, lecturing Rutgers and the world about the need to stand up to misogyny and bigotry, and yet she guest-blogs for a blog that referred to [National Review editor] Kate O'Beirne as "sandpaper" fill-in-the-blank, and issued death threats against Kate O'Beirne for writing her book about liberal women. Jane Hamsher, who's the head of that blog, is also the person who is responsible for blackfacing [Connecticut Sen.] Joe Lieberman. And yet, all of that's happened and still Hillary Clinton goes and guest-blogs for that blog.
Obviously, they feel the need to pander to those people, but at some point, they'll have to run away from that, and hopefully, that stain will be indelible. I hope so -- I'll try and make it that way.

David Eldridge, managing editor, WashingtonTimes.com: You've become, whether you wanted to or not, sort of a symbol for women online who are standing up to the vulgarity of the blogosphere and the Internet ... can you talk a little bit about that?

Mrs. Malkin: It would have been nice if The Washington Post reporter had actually contacted me before they took what I said out of context. My colleagues at Hot Air took care to make sure that my comments were put in context. Actually, it was on the front page that Ellen Nakashima's article was placed, which had a very sympathetic view toward a lot of these left-wing women bloggers, who are now discovering that there are unhinged elements on the Internet that say very sexually degrading and violent things to women.
And my reaction, when that whole thing blew up -- I mean, it's amazing how much press coverage it got, global press coverage, because one female tech-blogger had gotten anonymous comments on her blog. And these pale in comparison to the signed comments and signed blog comments that I've had to deal with ever since I entered the blogosphere in 2004. What I said was, "Yeah, well, welcome to the club. You know, Janie-come-latelies, thank you for the discovering this, but I've been highlighting this for three years now." I wrote a whole book about it. It was called 'Unhinged,' which exactly captures some of those elements, and I said when those threats are serious, you should report them to law enforcement, but otherwise, you should continue blogging.
I think that cowering and trembling and deciding you're going to quit blogging because some anonymous person has called you some sexist name is the opposite of what a proud feminist position should be. And of course, the way The Post characterized my view was as callous, as sort of brushing off the concerns these women had. In fact, I was expressing a lot of sympathy for it and telling these women to buck up.

Mr. Eldridge: What kind of precautions do you take as you become a public persona online? And how much of it is reasonable precaution and how much of it is, like you say, cowering and allowing someone to bully you away from what you're trying to do as a journalist and as a blogger?

Mrs. Malkin: Well, I think every journalist now, in the context of the 21st-century information age, is essentially a public figure. Everything that you say, whether it's under a byline or offhandedly at a party, is something that could potentially become a public issue.
I think it's a good direction to move in, for The Washington Times and every other paper, for that matter, to become a part of the blogosphere and the Internet. It's just a reality. It's how information gets disseminated.
Precautions? I take plenty of them. I won't get into the details, but it's sad that I can't do things on my blog that I used to when I started out. I used to post pictures of my kids. I used to talk about going fishing with them. I would give people heads-up -- I used to have this feature called "Where in the World," and I would talk about where I would be appearing, what book events, signings, if I was going to be in some part of the country and wanted people to stop by or whatever -- I don't do that anymore.
And I think that journalists who are conservatives have a lot more to worry about than, you know, so-called mainstream journalists or people on the left. I think that the disparate treatment of conservative speakers on college campuses underscores that. You know, the fact is, Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore don't need bodyguards, but pretty much every speaker on the right does now. The people on the left who appear for speaking events do not have to worry about getting pies or salad dressing or other foreign objects thrown at them. And I just think that now, it just comes with the territory. You just accept that.
There's that level of -- it's more than incivility, because there are those physical threats you have to deal with. So, you know, I just zealously guard the privacy of my family, obviously, but it's not going to stop me from doing what I do.
And so that's why I just felt the need to speak out about Kathy Sierra and the bloggers on the left, because they're saying now that what they have weathered is so drastic and so burdensome to them, that that's what's going to cause them to shut down. It's like, "You ain't seen nothing, honey. You don't know the half of it."

Mr. McCain: How do you see the evolving role of journalists -- specifically newspapers -- in the blogosphere? Can we be full participants?

Mrs. Malkin: I think as long as there's transparency about it. I think that there's no question, for example, that William Arkin at The Washington Post, who blogs there now, is not someone who can be trusted as an objective national security reporter. And I think that what The Washington Post should do is remove that neutral label as his title and just make him a full-time blogger, and to the extent that his pieces appear, they should appear on the opinion page.
But I don't have a problem with newspapers trying to have branded bloggers on their pages, bringing something new to the table and being full participants. I think full participation also argues for, you know, opening yourselves up to comments -- and, you know, The Washington Post has had a mixed record in regard to doing that. I also think they should be honest about where the problems come when they open their comments up. They're always trying to have a pose of moral equivalence, you know, "Oh, the conservative commenters are as bad as the liberal ones." Right. But you know, I think it's fairly clear where most of the incivility in the blogosphere comes from.

Mr. McCain: A friend once warned, "A blog will eat your life" -- it's addictive and time-consuming. Has that been true for you?

Mrs. Malkin: Absolutely. I confess -- I am a full blog junkie. I started out in June 2004 with MichelleMalkin.com.
I originally started that because I wanted to have a full, unadulterated debate about my second book, which is called "In Defense of Internment," and I knew that there would be considerable academic exchanges about it. And, obviously, The New York Times book review page and most mainstream book review pages are not places where conservative authors are treated fairly. And in fact, I had massive dialogue with two of the main scholars in this area, and was able to expose just how dishonest a lot of their arguments were, and really how cowardly they ended up being in challenging the book. And that's served as a great public record for anyone who's really interested in plumbing that history.
After that happened, though, you know, I'd been a blog reader since after 9/11 -- really, actually, before 9/11, I'd read Mickey Kaus' blog and Instapundit in the early days. Actually, I had a pre-blog at the same domain name in between jobs. I'd left the Seattle Times and had started my syndicated column. And so, even before there was blog software, I was using an old program called Microsoft Frontpage -- you can go back to the way-back machine and see the early versions of it. I would manually code the whole thing, and you know you'd have to, like, republish the whole entire Web site, and I probably had about five readers.
But after I jumped into it feet first, it's not something you can turn off. You do it in the middle of the night.

Al Gore and Michael Moore have their Oscars and Jimmy Carter's got a Nobel Peace Prize. But none of them are likely ever to win a Bradley.

The Bradley Prizes are awarded annually to intellectuals who have committed the unpardonable intellectual sin of being conservative.

Thursday's Bradley ceremony at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater was perhaps the most impressive event I've attended since moving to Washington in 1997.