Here, I'll let Max speak:
We also observe in these quarters the sophomoric desire to shock liberals. The quoted bloggers express a desire to win the vote. They think their viciousness is a badge of machismo, like suburban white boys who affect ghetto gangsta postures. We had the Beastie Boys, and now we have the beastie bloggers. They try to act dangerous, but all they really want to do is become commodities, and they don't even know it. There is no reason to fear nameless little people with keyboards. Rather, the approach is clinical, like the study of bugs.
The Mark Byron (2nd place) fantasy about murdering high officials of the U.S. Government is the quieter, equally demented side of this same dementia. His post seems to attain about 90 percent of the threshold for a visit from the Secret Service.
InstaPundit is a horse of a different color. His style is passive-aggressive, the way of the weasel. The attack is not direct and forthright, but delivered by innuendo, often through third parties. Criticism is more in sorrow than in anger. Plausible deniability shrouds his posts. If harm should befall the objects of his disapproval, it's really too bad but really their fault. They should have known better or somehow rejected bad leaders.
The quote submitted in the contest typifies this logic: genocide is a misfortune, not a crime. A crime has perpetrators, but for the enemies of America to be victims of genocide, the criminals would be the West, or the U.S. But that cannot be. By definition, the U.S. is good and cannot commit crimes. All references to crimes committed by the U.S. Government bespeak hatred of America and alignment with the Enemy.
This is a recipe for the production of cannon fodder. Watch the ticker.
