Colmes Top Liberal Tweeter

Not being someone who has ever warmed up to Facebook, I recently began to reexamine my other "trendy" social Internet application: Twitter. And I discovered that Twitter is very fast-loading on my Blackberry, regardless of the general Internet conditions around me.

I decided to follow various political advocates, both liberal and conservative, on Twitter. On the liberal side, I had begun with Keith Olbermann but quickly realized that his use of it wasn't designed for the public in general. Bill Maher was good, although he was often promoting upcoming gigs of his and some of his jokes were way over the top. Michael Moore's was also interesting but definitely a little too hard-core left. But that's good; I need to know the spectrum of how people react to the news. Finally, I was engaging in one of my (very) rare viewings of The O'Reilly Factor on FoxRepublicanNews when lo and behold, there he was: Alan Colmes as the liberal in the forum that was going on. And he was pretty good, holding his own well against criticisms and succeeding in making his own points against the other side. He is quite a persuasive speaker, and also seems committed to his views. I checked him out on Twitter and found out that he sends out pertinent short messages every couple of hours or so throughout the course of each day. He quickly became my favorite on Twitter.

Al Franken once lambasted Alan Colmes as being a convenient, submissive, and ultimately insignificant foil for Sean Hannity and FoxNews. He also called Colmes a "moderate", which surprised me a bit. Alan Colmes isn't far left, but he isn't in the political center either. I don't think he deserved Franken's criticism, especially since he and Colmes have an almost identical political outlook on things. One thing that does distinguish Colmes from Franken was that the former has consistently been more respectful of those with whom he disagrees (although he tends to interrupt too much, don't they all), while the latter has (at least before becoming a senator) repeatedly personally attacked their character (a problem that I also have with Olbermann).

Although I use Twitter to pick up on what some others are thinking, I still think that it is an inappropriate forum for adequately expressing opinions in a comprehensive way. But as a starting point, it has its advantages. However, I still don't see myself using it to send messages anytime soon...