When idiots speak, why listen?

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood today, but the liberal blogosphere is sort of getting on my nerves. It seems to me inordinate amounts of time and energy are spent shooting down things that known idiots say. Today's most prominent example is all the hubbub over the O'Hanlan and Pollack op-ed entitled "A War we might just Win" in today's NY Times (no, I'm not linking to it. Go there yourself if you like, but not on my link). These guys have proven themselves wrong so many times, why should anyone spend more time shooting them down? Yet, that's what's going on today. Perhaps the worst offender in this regard is Glenn Greenwald, whose blog is now almost exclusively devoted to shooting down known idiots. Glenn writes powerfully and has great ideas, but I really get bored by some of these tedious knock downs of known idiots.

Perhaps all this is necessary, but it doesn't seem to be stopping the news organizations that publish these idiots' rantings from continuing to do so. The rest of us all know they're idiots. In my case, I simply don't read their garbage. These days I almost never read anything written by either David Brooks or Tom Friedman, for example, or the opinion pages of either the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post.