Jeff Jarvis's pet peeve is bloggers who play gotcha with presidential candidates -- harping on minor issues or slips of the tongue when there's So Much At Stake. Doesn't bother me much -- that's what makes blogs fun. But when Dick Cheney does it, as he did when belittling John Kerry for using the word "sensitive" in the context of fighting terrorism (while brushing aside Kerry's other adjectives: effective, thoughtful, strategic, proactive), it just makes me want to say, Dude, don't you have a country to run, or a small child to frighten?
Cheney's remarks were so juvenile, simplistic, and obnoxious it almost made me think he should, well, be a blogger.
But the Bush administration has the public so bamboozled into thinking Bush=strength, whether you agree with him or not, that Cheney's comment plays, even with folks who should know better, like... Jeff Jarvis. It's not a remotely serious critique of Kerry's foreign policy plans (of which there is plenty to critique, though not if your own policy is even worse, I guess); it's just a gotcha. But it worked for him.
Fortunately, bloggers have ignored Jeff's call to end the gotchaism, which is why we now have an effective counter-gotcha to render Cheney's impotent, in the form of The Progress Report's compendium of the Bush administration's own calls for sensitivity in war.
As Jon Stewart put it, "I think the Vice President just called you a pussy."
Reminder: Now the fifth time I've linked this article since 9/11, but still worth reading. What a sensitive -- in the non-New Age sense of the word -- war on terrorism would look like, and why we need one, by Robert Wright