5am eastern time, Friday:

Sean Penn’s full page dissing of George Bush’s plan to blow Iraq to hell is distributed to about 800,000 washington post readers.

eleven a.m., eastern, friday, Reuters publishes a summary of Penn’s opinion.

noon, pacific time friday, i write a blog post (below) asking the blogosphere why none of the so called warbloggers have either discussed Penn’s full page diss, or linked to a scan copy of the writing, or have transcribed the piece.

five minutes after two pm, pst, friday NZ Bear summarizes the Reuters article and hints to his readers that he’s looking for the full text.

three pm pacific, saturday, nobody on the web has a transcript or link to a scan of the washington post page.

three thirty pm, pacific time, saturday after approximately 25+ comments on my blog saying that they don’t give a fuck as to what sean penn has to say about war, i post on Metafilter asking the readers two questions 1.) is there a scan on the web of the penn’s post page 2.) why is it that only republican actors are allowed to talk politics.

five ten pm metafilter user “puffin” says she has the ad and a scanner and says she will scan it and put it on the web.

5:27 pm, PST, saturday “puffin” posts penn’s post piece at http://imaginaire.nu/penn.gif

8:16, pst, saturday ray garraud posts the link to puffin’s page in the comments section of my blog. the request has been successfully answered nearly 30 hours after i asked for it.

10:51 pm PST, sunday the link to the penn scan is #12 on blogdex, the post racked up 61 comments on Metafilter (the highest commented saturday post on the community blog), and 41 comments on this blog (the highest commented post ever for the busblog). still only a few bloggers pay any attention to it because they believe it isn’t worthy, despite the numbers that say otherwise.

midnight, pst, sunday i mirror the penn piece here, for that’s the polite thing to do.

over the weekend jeff jarvis wrote a piece agreeing with me that voices of dissent of this war are not getting proper coverage, pontifexexmachina transcribed the entire penn article and says he couldn’t care less what penn has to say, the Instapundit has completely ignored the story, and Drudge has a prominent link with a headline that says “Drugs Found on Kid Rock’s Tour Bus…” which is really a story about the fact that an anonymous motorist called the cops who pulled over the bus that didn’t have Kid aboard, infact no one except the driver was aboard, and a drug sniffing dog found a joint and a pipe. this is what drudge considers newsworthy.

is this the way the web is supposed to work? instead of looking to warbloggers for transcripts of open letters to the president, a guy has to post a request on Metafilter and hope a 15 yr old highschooler/metafilter reader will do the right thing and scan in the article in question from her local paper?

where were the war bloggers? layne was on his wedding anniversary/birthday vacation, welch was getting the angel mojo working, doc searls was traveling to florida, instapundit was on the road: all legit excuses.

which means sean penn’s piece doesnt get on the web until a guy who fake interviews escalators bitches about it on his busblog and metafilter?

putting aside what penn actually had to say, the whole gist of my beef was that bloggers are missing their windows of opportunity. people have plenty of ways to get to their news and columns from more famous writers who editoralize. what the kids want today are links to things that no one else is linking to. tell them something they dont know.

let us believe that you really do read four or five papers a day by scanning in something that newspaper readers got from the wp that online readers didnt.

lord knows drudge wouldnt put out such an effort.

odds are the washington post probably isn’t going to do a linkable news analyst piece on an ad that they run because papers typically leave their advertisers alone. and wp.com isnt going to touch it even though that ad was basically a wp exclusive, because since it was an ad, they would start some mighty nasty precidents if they started giving free bandwidth on their web site to ads that only paid for newsprint distribution.

and the new york times isn’t going to comment on an ad in the washington post because competing papers usually dont tell you about great reasons to go out and buy their competitor’s paper.

now isnt that where the poltical blogs should be coming in? filling the gaps left gaping by the traditional press who act and write like wimps in situations that are unfamiliar to them?

and strangely, open letters from celebs to a president isnt something that the press knows how to cover very well when the opinion isnt via a traditional op/ed peice or press conference.

and similarilly, the warbloggers let us down on this story and got scooped by a 15 yr old girl in maryland and dissed by a 108 yr old in hollywood, distracted by the fact that the words came via a paid page in big time newspaper.

apparently, packaging is everything to this cynical society.

therefore, in my comments, a few people were surprised that i would feel let down by the wide net of self proclaimed news junkies who couldn’t get it together enough to produce a scan or a transcript of the actor’s statement in a timely manner.

you really needn’t be so surprised.

be surprised when i don’t call attention to the higher good of my fellow bloggers.

be surprised when i don’t give a shit.

the tower of babel wasn’t destroyed because it wasn’t any good. it was destroyed because it was too good. don’t be so surprised when im trying to make this glorified science fair project actually provide a freaking service.

and the best way to improve this whole daisy chain is to link everything. even stuff written by academy award nominees who might actually have something worthwhile to discuss, and if they don’t at least you have his text to make fun of.

the truth of the matter is most bloggers do this not because theyre pathetic failures like drudge, but because they love you.

drudge doesnt love you. if he did he wouldnt link to “news” like a joint being found on a rock n roll tourbus.

the networks and big time news agencies dont love you, otherwise there’d be no need for war blogs who analyze and get into great details about the things the news agencies dont want to get their hands dirty with.

some of you think that drudge loves you with his links, but thats cuz you’ve been denied real love for so long that you have a hard time figuring out any more what love really is.

instapundit loves you, as does welch and layne and jarvis and all the others who bust their ass to tell you things that you’d probably like to know.

do i love you?

everytime i dont capitalize or use punctuation consider that a secret message from me to you that i care so much about you that i’d rather type a few more words of love to you than worry about using that ridiculous shift key when you know damn well what i’m talking about.

and every time i dont tell you about something that anna k. did, or every time i dont tell you about a super hot girl with triple d’s spending the night with me, or every time i just let huge holes of the blogosphere go unnoticed without sliding in my dutchboy finger of awareness, that’s me not loving you.

let’s leave that sloppiness to guys like drudge who dont even have it together enough to register his own damn name.

me, i’m glad this is now all over so i can go back to lying about all the tail i get.

aloha,

tony