Think Norah Vincent has a bone to pick with certain liberal advocacy flunkies? Well, check out the first few paragraphs of her Los Angeles Times piece, “Liberal Media Ignore What They Don’t Want to Hear”:

Few creatures are more detestable, more verminous, than the special interest bureaucrat. He is the banal quintessence of evil. With his sniff of sedentary power, he is that most craven of all schlumps, always and everywhere just following orders, mindless and industrious as a louse, implacable as a meter maid. When challenged on his fierce illogic, he merely parrots the shopworn slogan, ‘I just work here.’

Today in America, such flacks are almost exclusively the property of the complainant left, which has homogenized and mass-produced them, wound them up and marched them, like Energizer bunnies, into the loop of public discourse.

Special interest lobbies such as the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation are home to battalions of these fanged pink fuzzies.

Vincent then goes on to expose the lack of coverage the mainstream media has given the new book by the lesbian former president of L.A.’s chapter of NOW, Tammy Bruce, titled The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds.

Aside from her spot-on assertion that left-wing McCarthyism and Nixonian scare tactics are standard fare among advocates of the so-called disenfranchised, what’s interesting about Bruce’s book is the lack of attention it’s getting in the liberal-leaning mainstream press, which goes a long way toward affirming the thesis of Bernard Goldberg’s new book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News.

As Bruce told me: ‘When I was with NOW, I could get an interview on anything anywhere. With the media’s complicity, I knew I could move any issue and make it work. Now they don’t even return my phone calls. I’ve found out what it’s like trying to get your message out when you’re on the ‘wrong’ side of an issue.’

Well, Tammy, now you know how Christina Hoff Sommers feels. Prominent radchic genderfems — like prominent race demagogues and prominent envirocrusaders, for instance — don’t like their methods exposed or their “science” and “scholarship” challenged. Their approach to civil discourse is weighted heavily with ad hominem attacks and with dogmatic assertions that resist all questioning.

That many in the mainstream media — as Bernie Goldberg and others have recently pointed out — are unwittingly complicit in a campaign of selective reporting on controversial issues (many in the newsy intelligensia believe themselves to be furthering worthy causes, after all, and so are blind to their own biases, oftentimes) is all the more reason to redouble our vigilance as critical thinkers. One of the reasons we started protein wisdom was because weblogs really lend themselves well to the kind of fact-checking and rapid exposure of error that you won’t get from newspapers or teevee. I mean, do you think Marc Herold counted on Bruce Rolston’s (among others) shredding of his egregious civilian death “research” within hours of its release?

None of which overstates the importance of bloggers, I don’t think; whether we webriffers reach a large enough audience to make a significant difference in the way information is disseminated — and culture critiqued — at this time is beside the point; what matters now is that many of us feel better informed, and so — in my case, at least — I’m able to correct certain mischaracterizations I hear coming from people in my sphere of influence, and to point them toward intelligent people who can make the case more strongly than can I. And that’s a real nice start toward evening the information-rich playing field…

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