No staffers were harmed in the writing of this post
Category: Navel Gazing... Politics...
Posted Tuesday, March 14, 2006 at 12:38 PM [GMT-6]

My fellow Midland bloggers over at Jessica's Well are having fun with U.S. Congressman Mike Conaway's blog.

I would never begrudge them the opportunity to haul out their impressive Photoshopping skills, and any elected official's attempts at blogging is fair game, albeit only slightly less challenging than shooting fish in the proverbial barrel. At the same time, there's no small irony in a collection of anonymous bloggers giving grief to Conaway for letting his staff write most of the posts on his blog. Someone should perhaps break it to the JW folks that Dubya doesn't actually write all of his speeches.

Then there's this pronouncement from the previously linked JW post: "Using Movable Type (or whatever) to post press releases does not a blog make." Really? I hope they'll pop over to Wikipedia and correct the obvious shortcomings in that site's definition of blog, which is apparently off base, beginning as it does, thusly: A blog (a portmanteau made by contracting the phrase "web log") is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. Regardless of your opinion about the quality or origin of the posts on Conaway's blog, as far as I can tell it still meets every aspect of that definition.

Still, lest you think that I have naught but criticism of JW and its pounding of the congressman's blog, let me go on record as saying that I wholeheartedly agree with its take on Conaway's proposed bill to require US congresspersonages to read the Constitution each session.