America On-Left

Has anyone else noticed an awful lot of AOL headlines like the one below?  I visit AOL's main page quite often, and it seems to me that there has been a little too much GOP-derived schadenfreude going on for what is supposed to be a news site:

Comments

[North Dallas Thirty]

Actually, the entertaining part is that the way Tim Kaine won, for instance, is by publicly pushing his religiosity and by staking out positions on things like abortion and gay rights that should be earning him a cascade of disdain from the abort-everything, there-is-no-God, anyone-who-supports-antigay-amendments crowd.

The NYT article I cited says that Democrats around the country are planning to do this. I wonder if HRC will continue its shrill condemnation of anyone who suggests banning gay rights, or if it will pull another Kerry/Tenenbaum?

[Yet Another Mike]

News site. Hee. Media bias. Hee hee. Silly wabbit, they are a "clickthrough-page hits-ad impressions" site. You should perhaps laud it as capitalism at work. Make netscape.com your home page for further evidence still.

A flow of stories on issues that are red state hot buttons, headlines often tangential to the stories they link to, vapid relationship advice to grab people who are married or not allowed to have sex yet lo-and-behold still read about it, har-har jokes, and reasons to base your diet on a single food and/or never go outside again thanks to causally inconclusive micro-n studies from pissant institutions.

Rest assured, those topics, headlines and photos are selected based on probing, exhaustive, up-to-the-minute analysis of hit logs. It may be, intriguingly, an impassionate reflection of what gets a rise out of a core Middle American, Baby Boomer and baby seats, lawn mowing and leaf raking, Big Box-shopping, computer-toe-dipping AOL customer base.

The resulting story selection seems far removed from the front pages of the The New York Times or The Washington Post; from either CNN *or* Fox News -- part of what makes it so refreshing or disturbing, depending on your mood.

[Dan]

Momma always said... it isn't mean if it's true :)

[Dan]

I also think NorthDallas is oversimplifying Kaine a little. It's true, he did trot out his religion from time to time while campaigning. And being (sorta) agnostic, this bugged me. But get real people - most of this country's head over heels for God. Apparently to the point where over half the folks out there doubt something as obvious as evolution because it contradicts the bible. So yah, we will probably need to put up with pious politician thing for the foreseeable future. The difference, imho, between religious folks like Kerry/Kaine and fundies like Kilgore/Bush is that they honestly respect other faiths (or the lack of faith). Sure, the GOP will occasionally pay lip service to the "etc." crowd, but in the end they're the ones trying to codify the good book.

[Michele Kelly]

They'll be back!