TED BARLOW TAKES ISSUE with my post on Alex Beam and the relative degrees of fun-ness on the left and right. I was certainly having fun with Beam, who seems to exist mostly for my amusement, and that of quite a few other bloggers.

But Barlow claims that Beam — and I — overstate the case. I think that’s a matter of perspective. I don’t know what Ted does for a living, but I’m pretty sure he’s not an academic. If you live in the academic world, the influence of the hair-shirt left is pretty damned obvious. It’s true that the priggish anti-sex wing of feminism has lost its lustre, and its credibility, in the wake of the Clinton / Lewinsky affair. It’s just impossible to take that sexual-harassment stuff very seriously after you’ve seen Susan Estrich, et al., saying that a blowjob between a boss and an employee is a purely private matter. (Human Resources offices still take it seriously, of course, but they’re required to take all sorts of stuff seriously). But serious or not, it’s still alive, in Human Resource offices and feminist studies anyway, and those still wield more power in my world than their moral or intellectual accomplishments would warrant.

Ted says that no one on the left defends Andrea Dworkin anymore, and produces an extensive list of blogosphere citations to prove it — only to be brought up short by Dworkin defenders in his comments section. (Another commenter, displaying the sort of rollicking good humor I’ve come to associate with certain segments of the left, says that I’m an “idiot.”)

But okay, I think it’s fair to say that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon don’t enjoy a lot of support from lefty bloggers. So what? Ted notes, correctly, that “The Right isn’t just a bunch of fun-loving VodkaPundits; it’s also where Jerry Falwell, Bill Bennett, Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson etc. live.” Well, true enough — but we need more fun-loving VodkaPundits and fewer of the others, and as best I can tell that’s where the right is these days — at least if you include the libertarian-inclined right, which you have to if you want to count me and Stephen Green as “right” bloggers. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson don’t enjoy a lot of support from righty bloggers — in fact, I explicitly mentioned them in the post that led Charles Johnson to coin the term “idiotarian.” My question is this: we know about the lefty Falwells — that would be Dworkin and MacKinnon, among many others. But where are the lefty Vodkapundits? And try as he may, Eric Alterman doesn’t count.

UPDATE: I’d count Welch and Layne as lefty VodkaPundits — but I don’t think that Ted, or most of the self-described lefty blogosphere, consider them lefties at all. Which, to my mind, helps to illustrate my point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an argument that Alterman is the VodkaPundit Of The Left. Well, the real VP would have been smoother, but then he’s been aging in the oaken barrels of the blogosphere for longer than Alterman. . . .

LAST UPDATE: Dave Shiflett has the last word:

More to the point is a larger question: Do any pundits really have fun? And, if so, what does this tell us about the pundit? . . . The saving grace for most pundits is that they are easily amused.

I think he might be onto something. Jim Treacher emails that he’s not a lefty VodkaPundit, but he might be a “moderate GinWonk.” Could be. Though his comments on Moby don’t sound all that “moderate.”