Sunday, June 04, 2006

Dear Byron: Jealousy really isn't healthy.


It's great fun watching the little rascals over at Kiddie Corner twist themselves into knots over the recent, commercial successes of the Left. Over here, Byron York (who has the unique ability to make even Jonah Goldberg look positively intellectual) just can't cope with the success of blogger Glenn Greenwald's new book, "How Would a Patriot Act?":

A few weeks ago I wrote a story about a book, How Would A Patriot Act? , by a relatively obscure blogger, Glenn Greenwald, ...

"Relatively obscure?" Oh, yeah ... 20,000 hits per day. A 2005 finalist for the Weblog Awards "Best New Blog" category. What a fucking nobody, right, Byron? You can see how painful it is for Byron to accept that Greenwald's book really is that much of a success:

Amazon executives told me they had no good explanation for it, although they believed their ranking system had sufficient safeguards against bulk purchases or other attempts to game the system. So the success of How Would A Patriot Act? appeared to be a legitimately new phenomenon of blog-powered book sales.

But, like everyone else at the Korner, Byron has limits on grace:

The question I have is that How Would A Patriot Act? is the only book on the list about which the Times notes that "some bookstores report receiving bulk orders." I'm not suggesting that there is anything untoward going on, but does anyone know how big the bulk orders are and where they might be coming from?

Yeah, there just has to be something devious going on here, eh, Byron? It couldn't be that that many people might actually want to read something written by someone who isn't, you know, a clinically insane, shrieking, racist wingnut.

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