When this enterprise began in 1995, not that many people had Internet access at home and those that did mostly relied on a dialup connection operating at a now painfully slow, 28 Kbits per second. Now the Internet has become ubiquitous and my cable modem regularly achieves download rates of 4 Mbits per second, nearly 150 times faster. Even if the connections are faster, but there is still an open question whether the amount of useful information transferred has increased proportionately.
This enterprise began when few used the Internet for politics. Indeed, one of the first essays I wrote compared the Republican and Democratic Party websites and suggested that the comparative mean spiritedness of the Democratic pages were a metaphor for their approach to politics. The comparative nature of these web sites has not changed very much, but at least the visual presentations have become more professional.
Now the number of political sites is enormous. I have a day job and writing once a week exhausts the time I am willing to devote to this enterprise. There are many other sites with political commentary produced several times a day with which I can not compete in terms of volume. I thus indulge myself in the agreeable fiction that quality compensates for any lack of quantity. One down side associated with the growth of the Internet is that the threshold to publishing is now so low that the signal-to-noise ratio in political discourse has decreased. My hope is that I have always contributed to the signal portion of that ratio.
A computer examination of my published text reveals that, not surprisingly, other than very common words, ``political'' is the most frequent word I have used over the years, appearing 984 times. The word ``Bush'' turns up 590 times and ``Clinton'' follows with 537 mentions, though both terms apply to more than one politician. There is no quick way to count the ratio of positive mentions to negative ones that Bush and Clinton have received. However, you can be confident that Bush received far more positive references than Clinton. Despite the fact that baseball is a metaphor for life, the term ``baseball'' appears a relatively few 139 times.
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