No more anonymous blogging: Lilac Sunday revealed!

OK, maybe not. That's not even my cat. Truth is, I live, work, and blog in Northern California, the belly of the Liberal Beast, and it would simply be professional suicide for me to blog under my own name.

And because I blog anonymously, CNN thinks I am a coward. Left Coast Rebel, Right Klik, and others in the patriotic blogosphere have good commentary on CNN American Morning's condemnation of bloggers and their cri de coeur against the "dark side" of the internet and in favor of internet gatekeepers to control content.

However, anonymity is not the same thing as untouchability, and therefore anonymous blogging should not be equated with irresponsibility. Even anonymous bloggers leave digital fingerprints, and a prospective plaintiff with good cause can get a court order from a judge ordering an ISP or blogging platform to reveal the identity of a blogger. So the notion that anonymous bloggers are a uniquely malevolent force just doesn't fly.

And what's more, the discussion on American Morning grew out of a discussion of the Shirley Sherrod video. God bless Andrew Breitbart, there isn't anything anonymous about him. I'll bet when he was a kid, he dressed up for Halloween as Andrew Breitbart. When the guest pointed out that the mainstream media sorted the case out in the end, CNN's Kyra Phillips responded "we can't always do that."

"We can't always do that." We are a global news organization, and we can't always separate fact from fiction. And that, Kyra, is why the bloggers have stepped into the breach, to do the work that CNN can't or won't do. Reasonable people can differ on whether the Sherrod video was a success or a failure, whether it was fumbled or handled brilliantly; I'm firmly with Team Breitbart on this one. But the fact that it has been widely reported and blogged and discussed and disagreed on is a good thing, a healthy thing. Everybody can sue everybody else, if she thinks she has a cause of action against Andrew Breitbart for publicizing her own words, let her try. She was involuntarily unemployed for maybe a day, and she has subsequently spoken with the President of the United States. Yes, I can see how those anonymous bloggers are causing irreparable harm, the only solution for which is to shred the Constitution and limit free speech.

Although I can kinda understand how Shirley Sherrod might be looking for some prior restraint right about now, because she has subsequently put her foot in her mouth. Her remarks about Andrew Breitbart being a racist and supporting the reinstitution of slavery have revealed her to be pretty much the same person she was in the first part of that video, the racist part that had the NAACP audience eating out of her hand. The racial enlightenment she claimed in the latter half of the story was great narrative, but she doesn't exactly seem to be living her own story. And that must be pretty embarrassing.