jim's op/ed

Liberal bloggers were aghast when Arianna Huffington announced the sale of Huffington Post to multi-media giant AOL. The general consensus was that she had sold out and that made for hurt feelings of betrayal. A lot of indie writers/bloggers had contributed to HuffPo over the years making it successful.
Initially I found HuffPo to be an interesting assortment of news & opinion but over the last few years it had morphed into a more superficial format that embraced the sensational stories like you find in magazines in the checkout line of a grocery store. Politics seemed to take a back seat to celebrity TMZ style reports and even a section for divorce. They do have a great section under "Big News" that follows BP's Gulf Oil Disaster.

The truth is that Arianna is a celebrity and often one of the featured talking heads you might find on Sunday morning in a political round table.
You might ask where did she come from and is she a lefty, liberal, progressive like many of the writers at HuffPo?
The answer is no, not even close.

this from consortiumnews...

"As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted, Huffington used almost the same words when she changed her political colorations a decade ago. In 2000, she told Fox News, "The old distinctions of right and left, Democrat, Republican, are pretty obsolete."

Milbank wrote: “Anybody who expects her to continue as a reliable voice of the left is a poor student of Huffington history. I first came across Huffington in 1995, when she was working at [Newt] Gingrich's Progress and Freedom Foundation, preaching social consciousness to fellow conservatives.

“She railed against ‘big government’ and pronounced: ‘We do our part and God meets us halfway. That's why I'm a conservative.’ That version of Huffington called for strict immigration restrictions. She favored Bill Clinton's resignation and floated the rumor that a former ambassador had been buried in Arlington because Clinton had slept with his wife.”

She thrived as a rightist talking-head during the height of the Clinton-bashing in the 1990s, decrying his marital infidelity even as her own marriage to Rep. Michael Huffington, R-California, had the look of a political arrangement. She divorced the multimillionaire Huffington in 1997, shortly before he disclosed that he was bisexual."