Blog of the Week: Tom Burka

Like many political bloggers, Tom Burka got tired of yelling at television commentators during the buildup to the 2004 political election, so the 45-year-old New York City lawyer started blogging to throw his opinions into the fray. His blog tagline, in fact, captures the sentiment quite nicely: "Opinions You Should Have."

His tone is decidedly liberal and honed by very tongue-in-cheek satire. (BlogPulse Profile here.) Headlines such as the post-FEMA "Bush to Investigate Self: Will Ask 'Where Was I' and 'What Was I Doing?' " or "Bush Nominates Actual Blank Slates to Supreme Court" set the tone for the prose that follows. (An August post is my personal favorite: "Bush to Extend August Vacation to Clear 'Especially Pernicious' Brush"). Burka's blog ranks No. 234 on BlogPulse's list of top blogs.

Q. What got you inspired to blog?
A. "I was very worked up about politics. Cable TV was driving me insane, as my wife will testify. I would watch these so-called experts say completely untrue things, which everybody would accept as fact, and I would go completely bonkers. My wife finally said, 'You've got to get off your soapbox, or if you're going to stay on it, find a different audience, and I'm NOT your audience.' "

Q. How would you describe your blog?
A. "My niche is news parody. It's entirely gratifying that people laugh out loud, and that's one of the reasons I keep doing it. I rein myself in a bit because I want to make sure that there's a certain level of quality to the humor...that I'm not writing something every day just to say something. I post 3-4 times a week."

Q. And your day job?
A. "I'm an appeals lawyer, which involves writing a lot of legal briefs. It doesn't give you a lot of room for creativity. Occasionlly, there are some legally funny things you can write about, and I do occasionally write them, but it's not really an outlet for my sense of humor, and certainly there's no place for my political positions."

A. Is there anything you won't write about?
A." There are certain things I just won't make fun of...like big tragedies."

Q. Most of your posts take on the red-state right. How do you decide what to write about?
A. "I'm probably going to spend a little more time aiming at the Democrats themselves. I think that it's not just one particular party...in many ways, it's the political system itself that is to blame, and a good satirist keeps his sights on all the targets." (He considered a post about the Democrats' reaction to Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts along the line of "Democrats Divided On How to Sink Party"..."there hasn't been any progress in the Democrats' drive to define themselves," he says.)

Q. Have you cut back on your writing since the election?
A. Every blogger who writes about politics was going crazy right up to the election. People were eating, sleeping, drinking politics. After the election, there was enormous fatigue....I'm actually writing a book, and that takes a lot of the creative energy and time away from being able to update the blog constantly. And I've noticed that a lot of the blogs that started out as single-author blogs have in the past six months become multiple-author blogs. It's impossible for someone to keep authoring at that level unless it's your job. I certainly have considered doing that as well (enlist contributors), but I really don't know anybody who can write this kind of humor at the level which I'd be happy with."

Q. What's next?
A. "I've got an agent, and this whole book project is the result of blogging. The stuff that's happened to me because of blogging is amazing. I've been on CNN. My stories have been read on MSNBC. I've had an op-ed piece in the New York Times. The book is going to be a satirical novel about Washington D.C. HR 327 is the working title...it's going to focus on a guy who's been sentenced to do time in Congress."