The Conscience of a Conservative?

Ken O'Brien

Copyright by Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press

Back between Christmas and New Year's I engaged in a little bit of reflection.

Having just rebooted The O'Zone at the start of December, I thought about how I might make it more useful to my readers.

I decided that one thing that I could do was to provide links to other blogs in the area that might provide viewpoints and information that would be both useful and enlightening.

While my primary focus is political, I decided that I would not limit myself to that genre alone. I also decided that I would welcome opposing points of view.

In looking for local blogs I came across one for the Sturbridge Tea Party.

I concluded that it would be appropriate to include it in my blog list as an alternative perspective to my obviously liberal outlook.

A day or two after adding its link to my site, I decided to take a deeper look at what was posted there.

To my surprise it appeared that listing it on The O’Zone had a quite salutary effect on the number of visitors it received. Here is how their traffic counter appeared on January 2^nd.



Somewhat bemused by what seemed to me to be more than mere coincidence I mentioned what I had observed to a friend whose political views are markedly to the right of my own.

My friend took it upon himself to post on the Tea Party site a comment about what I had done.

The comment drew a rather magnanimous reply from the sponsor of the sight.

Now, when I set out to expand my blog list I did not notify the sites I added, nor did I expect any reciprocity.

However, since the author of the site offered to “return the favor”, I figured I’d save him the trouble of hunting down my site. Therefore, I posted a note to him on his blog.

Now, that was a week ago.

This morning, Sturbridge Tea Party’s page views chart looked like this:

I take some kind of perverse pleasure in thinking I’m at least partly responsible for the sudden increase in this site’s readership. In the interim I have also added a link to another blog by the same author.

He remarks in his profile on the column he writes for the Boston Tea Party Examiner, that he “… believes in an educated citizenry so they can make informed decisions in the voting booth. He feels if he can get one person to think about an issue, then he has done his job.”

I would hope that an educated citizenry is by definition one that considers all sides of an issue.

I have no plans to remove my links.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if the author of these sites abided by his unsolicited offer?