Have You Ever Met a Mongol?

Yesterday, Daniel Henninger used his weekly WSJ column to comment on the rise of the conservative media. Speaking of Brian Anderson's new book, South Park Conservatives, he wrote:

As described by Mr. Anderson, a writer with the Manhattan Institute, conservatives established their first beachhead in the early 1990s with talk radio. Then Fox conquered cable news and finally a virtual Mongol horde of conservative-to-libertarian bloggers swept across the Internet [emphasis added]. In the 2004 election, these electric horsemen (apologies to Jane Fonda) pulled down Dan Rather and haunted John Kerry's war hero with Swift-boat ghosts.

I rather liked the description, not because of any particular fondness for the real Mongols of old, mind you, but for what it says about the MSM's perception of the pajama-clad-clueless-amateurs who've proven to be such a pain to the Brahmins of big media.

But Arthur Chrenkoff, best known for his tireless efforts to catalogue good news from Iraq and Afghanistan, spilled the beans about his own ancestry:

As probably one of only a few bloggers with any Mongol blood in them, I feel eminently qualified to comment. Well, not really eminently, and my Mongol heritage reaches back to the 16th century, when my Polish family intermarried with some Tartars who were much sought after by the noble families of what was then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on account of being very good with horses and hunting dogs, but that's the beautiful thing about our "Mongol horde" of the blogosphere - everyone can fire their arrow into the fray.

He then notes that the Mongols were really a flash-in-the-pan, a wild people who were soon assimilated into their conquered nations through intermarriage and acculturation. For that reason, he thinks, the MSM should wish that bloggers prove to be nothing more than a Mongol hoard, since we'd soon be absorbed by the industry we're harassing today.

That's not an unthinkable fate. If blogging follows the pattern of virtually every other industry, consolidation will occur, at least at some level. Indeed, just this week Roger Simon announced the formation of Pajama Media, an aggregation of bloggers who intend to form a news service and pool their advertising resources.

So let's imitate, figuratively, the Mongols of old (no horse blood for me, please) and ride circles around the old boys when we can, or when they deserve it. But let's also be careful about our own version of assimilation. There's little doubt that the Mongols had more to gain than did the Poles when they intermarried. I don't think that anology works in the current situation, although I'm always willing to discuss cash infusions.