Via Ka-Ching!

At Talking Points Memo, progressive Josh Marshall engages in some serious navel-gazing on the question of whether all the negative attacks on Sarah Palin by leftist blogs are giving her attention and inadvertently increasing her influence and inflating her importance.

Frequently a reader will write in to say, “Why are you giving her so much attention? You’re just pumping her up. If you and the other places would stop giving her so much oxygen, she and her whole circus would just wither away.”

I don’t know which circle of the hell of myopia you need to be residing in to think like this. But it’s very deep in there, I assure you. Much as I love this thing our team has created, I assure you that Palin’s popularity, notoriety, footprint on the public stage is quite independent of TPM. Indeed, TPM and a dozen other similar or not so similar publications you can find on the web. Palin is such a big deal because she’s got a chunk of the political nation that is very, very into her. She resonates deeply with her core supporters. She’s one of those people who cuts an electric figure on the public stage because she slices right through the society and generates one intense response from one side and a completely opposite but equally intense response from the other. And she says, let’s be honest, a lot of really crazy stuff.

This is actually a real blind spot for liberals in general—the idea that things that are crazy or tawdry or just outrageous are really best ignored. Don’t give them more attention. You’re just giving them what they want. Or maybe it’s not so practical and utilitarian. Maybe, they say, it’s just beneath us. Focus on the important stuff.

On so many levels this represents an alienation from the popular political culture which is not only troubling in itself but actually damages progressive and center-left politics in general no end. It’s almost the fatal flaw. Democrats often console themselves that even when they don’t win elections, usually their individual policies are more popular than those of Republicans. Too bad you can’t elect a policy. It’s true for instance that Health Care Reform—which still has more opponents than supporters—is pretty popular when you ask people about its individual components. But why is that? It’s not random, because that pattern crops up again and again. It’s another one of the examples where liberals—or a certain strain of liberalism—focuses way too much on the libretto of our political life and far too little on the score. It’s like you’re at a Wagner opera reading the libretto with your ear plugs in and think you’ve got the whole thing covered.

It is a lot of fun to see the progressive rats furiously spinning the wheels in their cages over Sarah Palin.

Palin’s ability to cause progressives generally to behave like roaches that have had 100% pure methedrine dropped on their carapaces is really, in my view, her most delightful talent.

Hat tip to Rodger Kamenetz.

Josh Marshall complains that representatives of the MSM in the nation’s Capitol are insufficiently on his side.

Like many others, I’ve been saying this for years. So I’m surprised to be surprised. But the journalistic establishment in Washington, whether it’s the Post or the Politico or much of the rest of the journalistic apparatus in the city, is essentially Republican in character—not necessarily in terms of individual voting habits, though you’d be surprised, but in fundamental outlook about whose opinions matter and how government functions, which is what really counts. And you can see that resurfacing with increasing clarity just in that last week.

Personally, I think the Washington Post would need to be blowing up US troops with IEDs to be more any more anti-Bush Administration than it is. I’d be curious to see Josh Marshall try expanding and justifying this curious claim to victimhood.

I am obliged to admit it: I never covered it at all.

Clinton had Janet Reno fire all 93 US attorneys, so why should there be a problem with the Bush Administration replacing 8 of them? I thought personally.

But it’s clear that those of us blogging on the Right screwed up on this one, and allowed the left blogosphere to gin up a fabricated scandal as the result of inadequate defense. (Though, Lord knows, I’m tired of defending George W. Bush, who doesn’t do much that’s effective by way of defending himself.)

Terry McDermott, in the LA Times, explains how the big-time leftie blogs did it.

over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration’s firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo.

The bloggers used the usual tools of good journalists everywhere — determination, insight, ingenuity — plus a powerful new force that was not available to reporters until blogging came along: the ability to communicate almost instantaneously with readers via the Internet and to deputize those readers as editorial researchers, in effect multiplying the reporting power by an order of magnitude.

In December, Josh Marshall, who owns and runs TPM , posted a short item linking to a news report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the firing of the U.S. attorney for that state. Marshall later followed up, adding that several U.S. attorneys were apparently being replaced and asked his 100,000 or so daily readers to write in if they knew anything about U.S. attorneys being fired in their areas.

For the two months that followed, Talking Points Memo and one of its sister sites, TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings. The cause was taken up among Democrats in Congress. One senior Justice Department official has resigned, and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales is now in the media crosshairs.

Read the whole thing.

And the moral is that we on the Right need to put on our waders and gas masks, and go trudging through the left blogosphere’s sewers more regularly than we do, keeping an eye on their mischief, so that we can demolish these kinds of attack memes before they successfully root themselves in the public dialogue.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.