AOLington Post

for anyone to feel betrayed by Arianna Huffington at this point is silly: The onetime Gingrich disciple has made a career out of serial reinvention; her latest transformation, from progressive doyenne to corporate contessa, is as predictable as it is lucrative. But what makes liberals’ reaction to Huffington’s supposed sellout even more ridiculous is the fact that the success of the Huffington Post had nothing to do with its politics. While the website may have started as “a liberal Drudge,” it has since become, in Shafer’s felicitous phrasing, an “SEO Speedwagon” — devoted to getting eyeballs any way it can, and specifically through search-engine baiting, aggressive aggregation that borders on theft, and slideshows of starlets that rival soft porn. This strategy has worked so well that, as Huffington herself notes, 85 percent of her site’s traffic now comes from nonpolitical content. (For once, she’s being sincere: No ideological cause drives a photomontage of “celebrity boob jobs.”) 

She used to, I well remember, be married to Michael Huffington.