Heaven knows, Andrew Sullivan is a prolific and occasionally intelligent blogger. Andrew combines a rather wide ranging curiosity with a penchant for enthusiastic argument. But… Andrew has turned into a textbook case demonstrating how sexual deviants, though often extraordinarily talented, are too frequently irrational, irresponsible, and abusive of positions of authority and trust.

A number of prominent bloggers marveled back in 2005 and 2006 as Andrew Sullivan magically transformed himself from a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq into a constant complainer about detainee treatment and enhanced interrogations. Frankly, it was impossible to fail to notice that Andrew Sullivan’s emotionalism on the subject of harsh treatment of jihadist detainees had the intensely subjective character of a hysterical sissy mentally projecting a grotesquely exaggerated version of detainee sufferings upon himself and then protesting accordingly. I believe it was Micky Kaus, around that time, who dubbed him “Excitable Andrew.”

Unfortunately, the psychosexual perversity just keeps happening.

Beyond the big salty tears that pour down Andrew’s hirsute cheeks over the sufferings of those poor little Jihadi terrorists, his next major insanity focuses on Sarah Palin, and Andrew’s behavior in relation to Palin is not a pretty sight.

It’s not easy to understand exactly why, but it is clear that an attractive, charismatic woman with conservative views has an enormous emotional impact on Andrew Sullivan. He has been blogging about crazed theories of his own about her family and publishing an endless series of attacks and accusations directed at Sarah Palin ever since she first appeared on the national political stage last year. The appearance of Sarah Palin’s book recently drove Andrew right around the bend. He published a lengthy list of alleged inaccuracies, and had to take a day off from blogging in order to obsess over how much he hates Sarah Palin.

It is more than a little unseemly for a major magazine like the Atlantic to offer a platform for Andrew Sullivan to use to throw the homosexual tantrums in which he lashes out so viciously and unrelentingly at Sarah Palin. The reader becomes uncomfortable, reluctantly recognizing in Sullivan’s rants the bitter jealousy of the pansy for the beauty and sexual attractiveness of the real woman, the obsessive hatred of the inverted and the sexually diseased for someone so conspicuously normal and healthy.

When you come right down to it, we Americans do not need the political advice of a non-citizen British subject, endless lectures on morality from a sexual pervert, or disquisitions of the proper limits of violence from a sissy. We also do not need Sullivan’s exhibitions of sexual hostility toward Sarah Palin.

He was recently arrested for drug law violations in Massachusetts. He is HIV positive, and consequently ineligible for naturalization. He has apparently admitted that accusations of attempts on his part to expose US residents to potentially fatal sexually transmitted disease are true.

Robert Stacy McCain is perfectly correct in his suggestion that the US should DEPORT ANDREW SULLIVAN! Do it.

Walter Olson, at Overlawyered, responds to the new FTC guidelines on disclosure affecting bloggers.

Come to think of it, I usually link books mentioned using Amazon’s Associates program, but Amazon has not had a sale from one of those in a very long time, as best I can recall. Does that count as disclosing?

Publishers sometimes send me books in hopes I’ll review or at least mention them. I occasionally attend free advance screenings of new movies (typically law-related documentaries) that filmmakers hope I’ll write about. This site has an Amazon affiliate store which has from time to time provided me with commissions after readers click links and proceed to purchase items, though it’s been almost entirely inactive for years. I get invited to attend the odd institutional banquet whose hosts sometimes give away a free book or paperweight along with the hotel meal. I’ve been sent “cause” T-shirts and law firm/support service provider promotional kits over the years, pretty much a waste of effort since I don’t much care for wearing such T-shirts and am not exactly famed for posts that sing the praises of law firms or their service providers.

Under new Federal Trade Commission guidelines in the works for some time, I could apparently get in trouble for not disclosing these and similarly exciting things. In addition, the commission’s scrutiny will extend to areas less relevant to this site, such as targeted Google advertising and results-not-typical testimonials.

Robert Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch finds it hard to see why the blogosphere has raised such a big fuss about these rules. After all, the rules (to be precise, “guidelines” backed by government lawyers with relevant enforcement powers) make clear that nondisclosure of a single minor freebie will not in itself suffice to trigger liability but instead will be counted “among several factors to be weighed” in evaluating the continuum of behavior by individuals engaging in social media (it seems the rules also apply to Twitter, Facebook, and guest appearances on talk shows, to name a few). FTC enforcers will engage in their own fact-specific, and inevitably subjective, balancing before deciding whether to press for fines or other penalties: in other words, instead of knowing whether you’re legally vulnerable or not, you get to guess.

Olson also quotes Ann Althouse, who identifies the crucial point here quite succinctly.

The most absurd part of it is the way the FTC is trying to make it okay by assuring us that they will be selective in deciding which writers on the internet to pursue. That is, they’ve deliberately made a grotesquely overbroad rule, enough to sweep so many of us into technical violations, but we’re supposed to feel soothed by the knowledge that government agents will decide who among us gets fined. No, no, no. Overbreath itself is a problem. And so is selective enforcement.

What do you suppose are the odds that Obama’s FTC is going to go after Kos for taking “consulting fees” (Kosola) from particular democrat candidates?

Andrew looks smug in his Atlantic logo illustration. It’s nice having friends in high places.

Remember George W. Bush?

We used to have a president so rigidly righteous that he actually refused to pardon Lewis Libby for defending his own administration and thus becoming the target of a special prosecutor and winding up convicted of perjury (in a case where no crime was really ever proven to have occurred) by a DC jury.

Now we have Barack Obama, who is not like that at all.

Intimidate voters, brandishing billy clubs in Philadelphia? You don’t get prosecuted if you were an Obama supporter. Eric Holder’s Justice Department will overrule career prosecutors for you.

Are you a governor or state official taking campaign contributions in exchange for contracts? If you’re a democrat, you are OK. Eric Holder’s Justice Department will drop the investigation.

Suppose you are a homosexual leftwing blogger, who also happens to be a non-US-citizen, in danger of getting into trouble with immigration if you are convicted of a misdemeanor for smoking marijuana on a Cape Cod Beach? You have a Get Out of Jail Free card, if you are, as Andrew Sullivan is, a faithful defender of Barack Obama and his policies. The US Attorney’s Office will go right on prosecuting non-Obama-supporting-bloggers coming before the court for the identical complaint, but will shock the court by giving you a special pass.

Andrew himself is declining to comment on the advice of counsel.

Boston Globe

Some News Agency

John Hinderaker has a comment.

Burns is the dumb-looking one in the middle

When NYM published the first blog coverage last week on the Murder Hollow Basset raid by the PSPCA, fellow field sports blogger Pat Burns of Terrierman’s Daily Dose, went into investigative mode, took Amy Worden’s essentially PSPCA-dictated damage control press release in the Inquirer as gospel, and proceeded to dismiss me as a paranoid rightwing blogger and Murder Hollow’s Master Wendy Willard as a “nutter” and a dog abuser. Burns’s publicly-performed Snoopy dance of triumph on this one was sufficient to make readers think he had the Pulitzer Prize in the bag.

He certainly made points with the PETA crowd, who happily began quoting Burns as the party line on the story.

I was personally disappointed because I actually read Burns’s blog regularly, but I merely noted in my response that Burns was relying on a single, obviously partisan source, repeating the PSPCA version of circumstances and events. I also identified some reasons why I think PSPCA’s word is not to be trusted.

Naturally, since I had received so much attention in Burn’s blog, I tried forwarding a link to my own posting in response. I had to go through a major log-in procedure to try posting a comment, and in the end my comment was merely forwarded to Burns for approval.

Several days later, it had not gotten into TDD’s comments, and I was rather displeased at what seemed to be a policy of censoring rejoinders at TDD, so I sent Burns a short email commenting negatively.

He responded, claiming to be “away from keyboard,” answering via cellphone, and he and I wound up arguing about all this by email much of the day on Sunday.

I didn’t publish our email correspondence myself, but Burns took a really stupid point of argument which no rational response could persuade him to relinquish as the occasion for another blog article.

I have challenged Mr Zincavage and the 11 “staff members” of the Murder Hollow Bassets to pay for three or four years worth of private (and legal) kenneling for those seized Philadelphia dogs.

There are many commercial kennels in Pennsylvania, and I am sure the the SPCA will have no objection to the dogs being placed in a good private kennel provided that three or four years worth of kennel fees are paid up in full and in advance, plus any veterinary bills accrued.

No, not a month. No, not four months. Three or four years.

After all, these dogs deserve continuity of care, and with 12 people to shoulder the cost of kenneling, it shouldn’t be too big a deal for everyone to pony up the price.

Talk is cheap.

But, of course, so too are most people—a point missed by many conservatives.

They will tell you they are against taxation, preferring instead that everything be done by some mysterious thing called “a Thousand Points of Light.”

Fine. Here’s a chance for Mr. Zincavage and the Murder Hollow “staff” to be a Point of Light. Pay for the veterinary costs plus three or four years of private kenneling for Wendy Willard’s basset hounds. She will still own them—the donors will simply be making a charitable gift to make sure things are done right by the dogs.

As I explained in our emails, nobody wants to lock up 11 hunting bassets away from their home, their owner, their pack, and the out-of-doors in a commercial kennel operated by strangers for three or four years. (How long does Burns think hounds live, do you suppose?) No rational reason or necessity proposes such a course.

Ms. Willard, her ten staff members, and the dozens of residents of the greater Philadelphia area who hunt with Murder Hollow Bassets are perfectly able to provide for those hounds, and if some imaginary tragic circumstance arrived to eliminate from the world every person affiliated with Murder Hollow, that hound pack is part of a national organization of affiliated packs. There are plenty of packs and individual basset hunters out there who could and would give all of Murder Hollow’s hounds new homes.

There is no need to do what Mr. Burns insists on proposing as his own subjective test of bona fides. No one wants such an arrangement. The PSPCA wouldn’t agree to it. And it would not, in the least, be in the interest of the hounds.

One really wonders, reading this kind of idiocy, what kind of understanding of hunting dogs, or dogs in general, the Terrierman possesses. Burns seems to look upon dogs purely as a cost center, a kind of tool requiring fixed costs that anyone can cheerfully stuff away in a warehouse setting for 3-4 years in order to prove a point.

But there is no point. The Murder Hollow Bassets have been an organized hunting pack chasing quarry in the field since 1986, and participating and competing in hound shows and pack trials since at least 1994. If they didn’t meet all the costs Mr. Burns’s fantasy is intended to project, they would hardly still be in operating existence, nor would they be accepted as a recognized basset pack by a knowledgeable community of hound lovers and keen sportsmen or be permitted to be part of the national organization.

At least according to a poll conducted by Daily Kos.

Politico:

Shocker poll from Kos/Research2000 today.

A whopping 58 percent of Republicans either think Barack Obama wasn’t born in the US (28 percent) or aren’t sure (30 percent). A mere 42 percent think he was.

Count me among the 30% Not sure.

I think he was probably born in Hawaii. But, who knows? Very serious money was spent on court cases in a large number of states in order to avoid releasing more records.

America’s Conscience: John Aravosis

John Aravosis, of leftwing AMERICAblog, scored a real journalistic coup, catching the RNC mocking Barack Obama with an imaginary Obama card, which Aravosis discovered could be used to buy “Anti-semitic, anti-Latino, and overtly pornographic literature – with pictures to boot.”

The bounders!

Except, wait… why! it’s all in Aravosis’s own head, as Right Wing News explains.

The website has a profanity filter in place that blocks certain words. Otherwise, all it does is pull up a search of that particular word on Amazon.com, which no one considers to be a racist or anti-semitic website.

In other words, what you’re seeing is a placebo effect for liberal bloggers. ...

It’s like a Rorschach test for the liberal psyche. You see a butterfly, they see Ronald Reagan beating a homeless guy to death with a baby panda.

(T)his has been controversial enough to make it all the way to The Politico in an article entitled, “RNC pulls game selling offensive items. ...

(T)he (real) story is that a bunch of childlike liberals, most of whom curse like sailors, typed words into a search engine that referenced Amazon and pretended to be shocked and offended by what pulled up.

Aravosis demanded an explanation from the Republican National Committee “for including ‘bondage,’ ‘anal,’ and ‘clitoris’.” Hilariously enough, Right Wing News has demonstrated that the RNC included no such words. All the racist and sexually charged search words came directly from Aravosis’s own dirty little mind and their only connection to the RNC page came via his typing them in himself.

Wow, talk about a story backfiring. A sanctimonious liberal hack takes a go at proving that Republicans are dirty-minded racist bigots, and winds up demonstrating before a huge audience exactly how self-righteous, prejudiced, dirty-minded, and basically incompetent he really is himself. Ouch!

John Aravosis Wikipedia entry

Pam Geller points out rightly that if this feel-good piece of House legislation introduced by Linda Sanchez back in April passes, all you have to do is offend someone and you can go to prison.

This law is unconstitutional, a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It destroys the basic tenets of the Constitution. The left is ripping it to shreds. You can view the bill here.

This represents the end of political blogging and free speech on the world wide web.

If both bills are not opposed and thrown out then the First Amendment will become nothing more than a relic of a bygone age.

That this is even being proposed speaks volumes as to how far America has fallen. Here is the language in the bill:

a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

‘(b) As used in this section-

‘(1) the term ‘communication’ means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received;

‘(2) the term ‘electronic means’ means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.’.

What this means?

U.S. House of Representatives would make it a felony to offend someone online.

A felony.

Under this new law you would not just be slapped on the wrist and have to pay a fine.

You would go to big boy prison.

When the Washington Post announced it was terminating the blog written by Dan Froomkin, howls of outrage arose from the left blogosphere, along with paranoid accusations of WaPo free speech being curtailed by sinister neocon influence. Right! At the same Washington Post employing Dana Priest to leak national security secrets.

I was wondering myself though what went down, and today I finally found an explanation by Andrew Alexander. It wasn’t personal, it wasn’t political, it was just about the money.

(B)ased on my discussions with others at The Post, as well as Froomkin, here’s my take.

First, it’s not about ideology. My original Omblog post quoted Hiatt as saying Froomkin’s “political orientation was not a factor in our decision.” In my discussions with Froomkin, he has not cited ideology as the primary reason. And several veteran Post reporters have dismissed that as the cause. In an online chat this week, Post Pulitzer-winning columnist Gene Weingarten, who expressed “respect” for Froomkin and regret that White House Watch was ending, said: “I don’t know why Froomkin’s column was dropped, but I can tell you that the diabolical conspiracy talk is nuts. Froomkin wasn’t dropped because he is too liberal; things just don’t work that way at the Post.” It’s also worth noting that The Post hired Ezra Klein, a liberal political blogger, within the past several months.

Second, reduced traffic played a big role. White House Watch had substantial traffic during the Bush administration, but it declined noticeably when President Obama took office. The Post will not disclose precise numbers. Froomkin acknowledges the drop but told me much of it can be blamed on a change in format and poor promotion. He said that shifting White House Watch from a column to a blog when Obama took office was disruptive to his audience and “dramatically reduced the number of page views per reader.” He also said poor promotion, especially through links from the home page, had caused traffic to dip. “I felt that with adequate promotion, page views would have been much higher,” he said.

Third, money was a factor. The Post is losing money. The Washington Post Co.’s newspaper division, which is dominated by The Post, reported a first-quarter operating loss of nearly $54 million. Every aspect of The Post’s print and online operation is being scrutinized for cost-cutting. Thus, when editors detected the drop-off in Froomkin’s traffic and looked at what he is being paid (a former Post Web site editor puts it “in the $90,000-to-$100,000” range), he became vulnerable.

Finally, there was disagreement over changing the direction of White House Watch. Some reporters and editors at The Post view Froomkin as a superb, hard-working “aggregator” whose blog needed more original reporting. Weingarten, without expressing his own judgment, alluded to this in his chat: “I can tell you that there has been some disagreement about Froomkin’s column over the years between the paper-paper and dotcom; the issue, I think, was whether he was as informed and qualified to opine as people who had been actively covering the White House for years.” Froomkin said his editors were urging changes in White House Watch, and he acknowledged
disagreement over content. For example, he was urged not to do media criticism. “I had always considered media criticism a big part of the column, as a lot of what I do is read and comment about what others have written about the White House,” he said.

In the end, Froomkin said that he was told in a recent meeting with his editors that his blog “wasn’t working anymore.”

“They wanted me to do it differently,” he said. But “the public response suggests that the readers were quite happy with it the way it was.”

And that, I think, succinctly captures the issue from both sides. The Post, needing to cut costs, sees a blog that has lost traffic and believes its author is unwilling to adjust to boost his audience. Froomkin acknowledges a traffic decline, but insists he maintains a robust audience and cites the large and loud reaction to his dismissal as evidence.

It raises several questions. Would Froomkin have been willing to work for less? (He did not answer the question when I posed it, and Post editors won’t say whether they offered.)

Andrew Sullivan counsels the Obama Administration to rely upon restraint, and green neck ties (!), to effectuate the liberation of the people of Iran.

[T]he evidence of outright fraud is now overwhelming. And the infliction of violence against defenseless protesters should be condemned forcefully.

The administration should, in my view, resist the grandstanding of the neocons – who remain almost autistic about the world they seek to remake – but insist that no violence be used against peaceful demonstrations. The truth is: if these crowds continue to grow and the regime does not massacre them, there’s a chance they could topple the regime. By focusing on government restraint, you can empower the resistance without giving Ahmadi’s thugs an opening.

Oh, and the president should wear a green tie from now on. Every day. He need say nothing more.

——————————————————

Even fellow converso John Cole finds Andrew’s approach a little twee.

If someone can give me one legitimate piece of evidence that wearing green boxers is going to help bring democracy to Iran, so help me I’ll wear plaid from head to toe and shoot for world peace.

I know he means well, but this is what I was talking about this morning when I said that the coverage of the events in Iran by American bloggers was giving me a warblogger circa 2003 vibe. I can’t be the only one who is reminded of Abbie Hoffman’s plans to levitate the Pentagon through the power of meditation.

My thoughts are with the folks in Iran risking it all fighting for democracy, but this can not be said enough- this is not about us, it is about them. I love the coverage of events, but please stop with this narcissistic nonsense.

Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher and the Kos himself fired (in private) the first shots in a struggle over advertising dollars and other forms of support between the left-side of the blogosphere and the financially-troubled dinosaur news media.

Greg Sargent broke the story:

Some of the leading liberal bloggers are privately furious with the major progressive groups — and in some cases, the Democratic Party committees — for failing to spend money advertising on their sites, even as these groups constantly ask the bloggers for free assistance in driving their message.

It’s a development that’s creating tensions on the left and raises questions about the future role of the blogosphere at a time when a Dem is in the White House and liberalism could be headed for a period of sustained ascendancy.

A number of these top bloggers agreed to come on record with me after privately arguing to these groups that they deserved a share in the ad wealth and couldn’t be taken for granted any longer.

“They come to us, expecting us to give them free publicity, and we do, but it’s not a two way street,” Jane Hamsher, the founder of FiredogLake, said in an interview. “They won’t do anything in return. They’re not advertising with us. They’re not offering fellowships. They’re not doing anything to help financially, and people are growing increasingly resentful.”

Hamsher singled out Americans United for Change, which raises and spends big money on TV ad campaigns driving Obama’s agenda, as well as the constellation of groups associated with it, and the American Association of Retired Persons, also a big TV advertiser.

“Most want the easy way — having a big blogger promote their agenda,” adds Markos Moulitsas, the founder of DailyKos. “Then they turn around and spend $50K for a one-page ad in the New York Times or whatever.” Moulitsas adds that officials at such groups often do nothing to engage the sites’s audiences by, say, writing posts, instead wanting the bloggers to do everything for them.

Naturally enough, the spectacle of the self-appointed tribunes of the poor leaping and snapping at a major pile of cash was bound to provoke a certain amount of derision.

Rick Moran offered only false sympathy.

Hey! I’m with you guys 100%. If you’re going to shill, the least you can ask for is some pocket change. All those years of brown nosing and you’d think these big shots would have the common courtesy to toss a few coins in the hat and give you a hanky to wipe the stain off your face. I mean, what’s the use of prostituting yourself if the party pooh-bahs won’t leave any money on the dresser when they leave?

Meanwhile, Don Surber chuckled that it was too late for Jane to try to put a meter on it. “Why should they pay Hamsher to do what she was going to do anyway for free?”

Mickey Kaus suggests that Hamsher and Kos should pay attention to the approach described in Amy Wallace’s profile of Variety’s former editor-in-chief Peter Bart

I have to tell you a story,” the studio boss said, launching into a tale about a lunch with Bart the previous December. It wasn’t the first lunch the two had shared, but this one was memorable.

According to this studio chief, before they’d even looked at their menus, Bart announced: “Your studio has not been advertising enough in Variety. That has affected my Christmas bonus.” Bart said there would be repercussions, the studio chief told me: “For the next six months, you won’t catch a break in Variety.”

I asked if Bart made good on his threat. “Oh yes,” the studio chief said, noting that even on the weekends the studio came in No. 1 at the box-office, the story in Variety would start off with a dig—something like, “Despite a string of flops…” So what did you do, I asked. The studio chief didn’t hesitate: “We upped our ad buy.”

This isn’t Kos’s first grab for the bucks either. Remember the great Kosola Scandal of 2006?

“What if the government put a cap on blog readership? or the number of words you could post?” one of Matthew Yglesias’s readers proposed as a thinking point in the course of arguing against the Gen Y pinko’s suggestion for a 95% tax on earnings over $10 million.

“Fine by me, I’d love to post fewer words,” replied the crafty Rand villain, carefully sidestepping the reduced benefits to him (fewer readers) portion of the analogy and seizing like a limpet onto to the “less work” portion. They train them well in precisely this kind of sophistry in our elite schools.

The redoubtable Ann Althouse announced her engagement yesterday with a series of photos, including a finger being measured for a ring, accompanied with shots of flower, foliage, and views of Cincinnati, the city where her apparent victim (a braver man than me) evidently resides.

Ms. Althouse met her fiance, we are informed, four years ago via his commenting on her blog.

Never Yet Melted extends congratulations and best wishes.

Mu Ch’i, Six Persimmons, 13th century, Japan, ink on paper, Daitoku-ji, Kyoto, Japan

Andrew Sullivan, with an air of pious approbation, yesterday linked and quoted an interesting essay by Stewart K. Lundy which proposes to define Conservatism as a form of Zen. It seems a bit odd to me that the perennially agitated and volatile Andrew Sullivan, notorious for combining vehement certainty with rapidly shifting positions, thinks he finds some reflection of his own philosophy or personality in Lundy’s mystical quietism, but there you are.

Mr. Lundy is evidently a neighbor of mine in Loudoun County, Virginia, a senior at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville.

Ignorance is the source of knowledge, silence is the source of noise, and stillness is the source of change. The emptiness of the future provides the possibility for movement. This is the principle of conservatism: preserving not only possibility, but the very possibility of possibilities. This impulse is conservative, but never at the expense of future generations. Conservatism is the art of living.

“The best people have a nature like that of water. They’re like mist or dew in the sky, like a stream or a spring on land. Most people hate moist or muddy places, places where water alone dwells. . . . As water empties, it gives life to others. It reflects without being impure, and there is nothing it cannot wash clean. Water can take any shape, and it is never out of touch with the seasons. How could anyone malign something with such qualities as this.”

— Ho-Shang Kung in Red Pine’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.

Why the example of water? Water is inherently conservative, conforming to its conditions yet remaining essentially the same. Water prefers stillness. If it is a stream, it runs downhill until it finds a resting place; but it is always in the process of changing, yet it is always only water. In the same way, the essence of conservatism is always the same, even though its conditions constantly change. Were conditions to cease their perpetual flux, conservatism comes to rest as a tranquil pond. The goal of conservatism is tranquility.

In itself, conservatism is tranquil. In relation to the ever-changing human condition, conservatism is always adapting. Conservatism is “formless” like water: it takes the shape of its conditions, but always remains the same. This is why Russell Kirk calls conservatism the “negation of ideology” in The Politics of Prudence. It is precisely the formlessness of conservatism which gives it its vitality. Left alone, the spirit of conservatism is essentially what T.S. Eliot calls the “stillness between two waves of the sea” in “Little Gidding” of his Four Quartets. Conservatism is both like water and the stillness between the waves—the waves are not the water acting, but being acted upon; stillness is the default state of conservatism:

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity

Like the Greek concept of kairos—acting in the right way, for the right reasons, at the right moment—this sort of waiting is simply careful conservatism. Conservatism is responsive, reactionary, reserved. Conservatism waits. Perhaps this is why conservatism is most needed in the modern age of mobility. Being careful, and above all patient is crucial to doing something right. Realizing that one does not know the best way of doing anything guarantees not that one will find the best way, but that one might not find the worst way. The same principle applies to knowledge: conservatism (hopefully) does not pretend to know the definitive way, but rather professes the virtue of ignorance with the quiet hope of finding knowledge.

Read the whole thing.

People going through today’s American educational system can be assured to have been intensely trained to understand that using crude stereotypes to whip up hatred toward Jews and blacks in order to justify targeting them with public and private persecution is gravely wrong.

I can remember, though, a day back in my parochial elementary school when our nun brought in a film projector and told us all about the Holocaust. Scarcifying images of great piles of emaciated bodies being pushed into mass graves by bulldozers, of skeletons lying in piles in ovens, of the pitiful starven and emaciated survivors took the entire class of children through the emotional wringer. How could human beings do such things to other people? more than one classmate demanded indignantly in the subsequent discussion.

Then rang the recess bell. As my classmates filed down the porch steps to the asphalt school yard, the dark atmosphere of the tormented history of Europe suddenly lifted, and, to my own astonishment, first one aggressor singled out a particular class misfit for persecution, then one by one nearly all of my classmates joined in. I marveled at the time that so much enthusiasm for the accepted moral lesson could go hand in hand with a complete incapacity to generalize it.

Editors and journalists employed by major newspapers and television networks are highly paid members of America’s upper middle class community of privilege, but that does not stop them from behaving like nasty school children ganging up on vulnerable victims, or from forming lynch mobs to go after not-necessarily-in-every-case better-paid business executives.

We’ve had a disgraceful orgy of class hatred for days now directed at AIG employees who receive, in accordance with the custom of their industry, large portions of their compensation in the form of bonuses. The bolshevik quarter of the blogosphere and the mainstream media have been deliberately whipping up public indignation by using selective and inflammatory reporting and general ignorance of the bonus compensation system as a basis for stirring up group hatred aimed at Wall Street and the business community as a class.

A trader or division leader in a firm which is losing money may himself, of course, be making his firm all kinds of money, and may be more than amply exceeding his own profit targets. It is not extraordinary or astonishing in the least that in an industry in which bonuses play a major role that, even in times of negative overall earnings, firms may be obligated by contract to pay bonuses to many executives.

The press also doesn’t stop to remind the public that any responsible business organization will first pay its own employees, before it attempts to meet external obligations to creditor or stockholders, or even to Big Brother.

The press and the leftwing blogs are simply cynically manipulating the emotions of the public by relying on false stereotypes and imaginary grievances to stir up envy and hatred which they propose to use to as the mechanism for gaining public support for their own radical, pernicious, and socially and economically destructive agenda of institutionalizing class warfare in public policy.

The American socialist revolution ironically typically features the fat and comfortable bourgeoisie yelling for the blood of the harder-working, less prestigious representative of exactly the same class as himself.

The gleeful tricoteuses at the Washington Post report that the public’s “rage swells,” proud of having whipped the mob into a sufficient fury as to pose actual physical hazard to their fellow citizens.

A tidal wave of public outrage over bonus payments swamped American International Group yesterday. Hired guards stood watch outside the suburban Connecticut offices of AIG Financial Products, the division whose exotic derivatives brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse last year. Inside, death threats and angry letters flooded e-mail inboxes. Irate callers lit up the phone lines. Senior managers submitted their resignations. Some employees didn’t show up at all.

“It’s a mob effect,” one senior executive said. “It’s putting people’s lives in danger.”

Even so-called Republicans senators, like the egregious Charles Grassley of Iowa, have been unable to resist the temptation to pick on a defenseless target. Grassley is quoted by the Politico suggesting that AIG executives entitled to bonuses should resign or commit seppuku.

American life is growing darker and more dishonest.

Former Saudi Ambassador Charles Freeman said he was throwing himself under the bus, as a form of protest against the nefarious domination of American foreign policy by the International Zionist Conspiracy.

Washington Post:

Charles W. Freeman Jr. withdrew yesterday from his appointment as chairman of the National Intelligence Council after questions about his impartiality were raised among members of Congress and with White House officials.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said he accepted Freeman’s decision “with great regret.” The withdrawal came hours after Blair had given a spirited defense on Capitol Hill of the outspoken former ambassador.

Freeman had come under fire for statements he had made about Israeli policies and for his past connections to Saudi and Chinese interests. ...

In an e-mail sent to friends yesterday evening, Freeman said he had concluded the attacks on him would not end once he was in office and that he did not believe the NIC “could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack.” He wrote that those who questioned his background employed “selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record . . . and an utter disregard for the truth.”

Such attacks, he said, “will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues.” And he said he regretted that his withdrawal may cause others to doubt the administration’s latitude in such matters.

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But, as Greg Sargent reports, Chuck Schumer is trying to take credit for pushing him.

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Andrew Sullivan finds the process interesting. The debate was in the blogs, not the MSM.

There are a couple of things worth noting about this minor, yet major, Washington spat. The first is that the MSM has barely covered it as a news story, and the entire debate occurred in the blogosphere. I don’t know why. But that would be a very useful line of inquiry for a media journalist.

The second is that Obama may bring change in many areas, but there is no possibility of change on the Israel-Palestine question. Having the kind of debate in America that they have in Israel, let alone Europe, on the way ahead in the Middle East is simply forbidden. Even if a president wants to have differing sources of advice on many questions, the Congress will prevent any actual, genuinely open debate on Israel. More to the point: the Obama peeps never defended Freeman. They were too scared. The fact that Obama blinked means no one else in Washington will ever dare to go through the hazing that Freeman endured. And so the chilling effect is as real as it is deliberate.

Our own original 2/26 posting was one of the earliest.

Some of us have very amusing commenters. At Ann Althouse’s blog, garage mahal writes:

Althouse voting for Obama is like buying a Barbie to mutilate it.

Jane Fonda has started blogging and, sure enough, it took her only 4 entries to get down to business: opposing US military efforts overseas and lending aid and comfort to the enemy.

Her topic was one Marlissa Grogan, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and one of the so-called Hempstead 15, a group arrested by Nassau County Police for disorderly conduct during a protest outside of the final presidential debate at Hofstra University on October 15, 2008.

I left rehearsal tonight in a temp wig and costume to go downtown to the screenings of The FTA Show. David Zeiger and I came in after the first showing was over and answered questions. Joining us was Marlisa Grogan, Captain in the US Marine Corp (29 UES). I had never met her before and was very impressed. She has such a deep understanding of why it is important for us to support active duty members of the military who are anti war or, at least, anti a war they feel is wrong and ill-conceived. She herself has been involved in an anti war show that has performed for active duty personnel. She said that it is the soldiers who have seen active duty who tend to be anti war more than the ones who have stayed stateside. “They just don’t know,” she said.

She talked about the similarities that exist between today’s military and those of the Vietnam era but also pointed out the profound differences, citing in particular, the fact that so many recruits are confronted with the choice between jail or military. For many it’s a much needed job. Look how young she is, yet so wise and committed. “We can’t just rely on the hope that Obama has brought us,” she told the audience. “We have to get off our asses and make sure we organize and speak out for what we feel is right.”

Time to update Fonda’s soubriquet to “Jihad Jane.”

When the multi-talented Charles Johnson and Roger Simon announced the successful first round of financing for an advertising coalition of bloggers, originally known as “Open Source Media” back in November of 2005, there was a veritable explosion of negative emotion on the Blogosphere.

Several notorious contrarians deplored what they perceived as “fencing in the open range.” The institutionalization and amalgamation of blogging under a commercial entity, they argued, would stifle creativity and surrender the freedom of individual self expression to crass commercialism.

Others, like Dennis the Peasant (who claimed he had collaborated with Roger Simon in coming up with the big idea, and been later jilted) were pea green with envy, as visions of bloggers a few years down the road cashing in PJM stock worth untold millions and tooling down the highways in shiny new Ferraris danced through everyone’s head.

One particularly hostile blogger set up a PJM Death Pool, gleefully predicting the imminent breakup and demise of the new project, and inviting critics to place their bets and pick a date. The Death Pool’s last posting occurred in May of 2006, and the betting pool raised a whopping $18.

After all of 2005-2006’s storm and fury, it was a bit disappointing to learn last night that Roger Simon had announced the dissolution of the PJM advertising network and the termination of payments to member bloggers as of April 1, 2009. Simon stated that the proprietors intend to re-direct the PJM project toward television programming production.

Pity. The recession obviously was the final nail in PJM’s coffin, but it seems clear in retrospect that blog readership didn’t really continue growing rapidly to the sky, blogging didn’t actually replace print and electronic journalism, and nobody has succeeded in developing a terribly lucrative advertising model for blog sites.

All PJM seems to have achieved, in retrospect was to divert the talents and energies of Charles Johnson, and some of his very talented editors, away from blogging to the pursuit of a chimera. But, who knows? perhaps the lessons learned in this first experiment in a blogging business model will, in the end, make possible the development of the ship which actually sails.

The editor of Never Yet Melted extends his condolences on the unhappy result of so much effort, and best wishes for future prosperity and success (new red ferraris for all!), to the management, editors, and individual PJM bloggers.

In the course of a valedictory interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, Vice President Cheney took some satisfaction in the administration he served having succeeded in preventing a second mass terrorism attack, and shrugged off its loss of popularity.

CHENEY: We didn’t set out to achieve the highest level of polls that we could during the course of this administration.

We set out to do what we thought was necessary and essential for the country. That clearly was the guiding principle with respect to the aftermath of 9/11. I feel very good about a lot of the things we’ve done in this administration. I think that they will be viewed in a favorable light when it’s time to write the history of this era.

I think the fact that we were able to protect the nation against further attacks from Al Qaida for 7.5 years is a remarkable achievement. To do that, we had to adopt some unpopular policies that have been widely criticized by our critics.

But I think in terms of — is 29 percent good enough for me? Well, we fought a tough reelection battle. We won by an adequate margin in 2004. We’ve been here for eight years now. Eventually, you wear out your welcome in this business.

But I’ve — I’m very comfortable with where we are and what we achieved substantively. And frankly, I would not want to be one of those guys who spends all his time reading the polls. I think people like that shouldn’t serve in these job.

And in response to a predictable reference to alleged Constitutional overreach, Cheney effortlessly eviscerates his democrat opponent.

WALLACE: Biden has said that he believes you have dangerously expansive views of executive power.

CHENEY: Well, I just fundamentally disagree with him. He also said that the — all the powers and responsibilities of the executive branch are laid out in Article 1 of the Constitution. Well, they’re not. Article 1 of the Constitution is the one on the legislative branch.

Joe’s been chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a member of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate, for 36 years, teaches constitutional law back in Delaware, and can’t keep straight which article of the Constitution provides for the legislature and which provides for the executive.

So I think — I write that off as campaign rhetoric. I don’t take it seriously. And if he wants to diminish the office of vice president, that’s obviously his call.

And on the inadvertent comedy front, excitable Andrew Sullivan uses the Cheney interview as the occasion for one of the most spectacular displays of begging the question achieved by any leftwing commentator all year.

What Cheney has advanced is that the president has the right to dissolve the constitution permanently. That he has the right to commit war crimes with impunity. That there is no legal authority to which he is ever required to pay deference in a war that is his and his alone to declare and end. Now when you consider that, in Cheney’s view, these war-powers are limitless, and that war is declared not by the Congress but by the president, and can be defined against a broad, amorphous enemy such as “terrorism”, and never end, you begin to see what a dangerous man he is, and how much danger we have all been in since he seized control of the government seven years ago. ...

The vice-president long ago became an enemy to the Constitution and to all it represents. He should have been impeached long ago; and the shamelessness of his exit makes prosecution all the more vital. If we let this would-be dictator do what he has done to the constitution and get away with it, the damage to the American idea is deep and permanent.

And then he stole the baby’s candy and kicked the cat, too, right, Andrew?

It’s sad that we had to lose this year, but conservatives and Republicans can console themselves with Barack Obama’s unhappy prospects based upon the irreconcilable dilemma facing his presidency.

If he takes a thoroughly “progressive” course, agreeable to the democrat party’s leftwing base, he will assuredly produce economic calamity domestically and US humiliation in foreign affairs à la Carter, and he will then have a snowball’s chance in Hell of being re-elected.

On the other hand, if he tacks to the center, he will bitterly disappoint that extremist and highly volatile leftist base, which will turn upon him like the Furies, ultimately over time bringing into active and hostile opposition both the media and the community of fashion. In that case, like Lyndon Johnson, he will become a discredited, failed, and reviled president, unable to defeat primary challenges from the left, and not even able to run for a second term.

Will it be Door 1 or Door 2, President Obama?

As the Telegraph reports, his appointments of supporters of the war in Iraq signal a centrist direction, and the natives at Daily Kos are already becoming restless.

Mr Obama has moved quickly in the last 48 hours to get his cabinet team in place, unveiling a raft of heavyweight appointments, in addition to Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State.

But his preference for General James Jones, a former Nato commander who backed John McCain, as his National Security Adviser and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a supporter of the war, to run the Homeland Security department has dismayed many of his earliest supporters.

The likelihood that Mr Obama will retain George W Bush’s Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has reinforced the notion that he will not aggressively pursue the radical withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq over the next 16 months and engagement with rogue states that he has pledged.

Chris Bowers of the influential OpenLeft.com blog complained: “That is, over all, a centre-right foreign policy team. I feel incredibly frustrated. Progressives are being entirely left out of Obama’s major appointments so far.”

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos site, the in-house talking shop for the anti-war Left, warned that Democrats risk sounding “tone deaf” to the views of “the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush policies.”

A spokesman for the President-elect was forced to confirm that Mr Obama holds to his previous views. “His position on Iraq has not changed and will not change.”

But the growing disillusionment underlines the fine line Mr Obama must walk between appearing to reach out to former opponents and keeping his grassroot supporters happy.

Argues Paul Boutin in Wired:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

If you quit now, you’re in good company. Notorious chatterbox Jason Calacanis made millions from his Weblogs network. But he flat-out retired his own blog in July. “Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it,” he wrote in his final post.

Impersonal is correct: Scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.

When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google’s search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for “Mark” ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama’s latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.

Read the whole thing.
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He seems a bit overly pessimistic to me.

I think election year fatigue can be observed right now, and a lot of Right bloggers are understandably depressed. I’ve found it impossible to get a link from any of the big time blogs for a long time now, and have nearly completely stopped emailing any of them. Still, traffic tends to creep upward slowly. And NYM postings do come up high on Google fairly regularly.

I disagree with Boutin. Innovative and amusing blogging concepts, like Stuff White People Like, can still very rapidly gain a major audience, and even we boutique bloggers, aiming at a more sophisticated and inevitably limited readership, are able to attract a few thousand readers per diem. Professional group blogs don’t bother me a bit.

Tom Elia describes how the leftist media and the blogosphere punished the disloyal peasant for presuming to question the tax policies of the Chosen One.

Like many of us, Mr. Wurzelbacher has questions about Barack Obama’s tax policy, among other things.

So what happens to Mr. Wurzelbacher for expressing his views?

Reports in the mainstream media appear claiming that he is unlicensed (even though he doesn’t need one as an employee of a business or as a contractor working on a residence), and that he apparently has a tax lien filed against him.

Not to be outdone, the Daily Kos published his home address for all the world to see.

The Democratic Underground just threw whatever they could at the guy.

Better think a little longer next time if you wish to criticize a Chicago Democrat running for president (or anything else, for that matter).

You might get ‘the treatment.’

Read the whole thing.

MacRanger

Obama campaign supporters’ thuggish efforts to suppress criticism of Obama have progressed to the level of hacking attacks (using “sql bombs”) on prominent conservative blogs like Macsmind, published by Jack Moss, who signs his posts “MacRanger.” Moss is a journalist and lecturer, retired from a professional military career focused on Intelligence and Logistics, who writes commonly on Intelligence and Defense issues as well as politics.

Gateway Pundit has the story.

This is MacRanger of Macsmind. As you know I was hacked by operatives of the Obama Campaign last month. Well, it happened again. Basically they flooded the site with “sql bombs” according to the host that caused the shared server to stop running. Subsequently he had to disable the site. This had to do with running the “Obama wants to Disarm America” post which more than 2 million people viewed on the site. Just like the goons in Missouri, the Obama truthers can’t let the truth be known. I’ve now moved the blog back to blogspot at macsmind.blogspot.com at least temporally. Because of the hacking job I had to move to another host but unfortunately they haven’t got the server up yet to redirect the traffic to blogspot. I would appreciate a mention to your readers. I’m getting a couple of hundred emails about “what happened”, but as you can imagine it hard to get the word out by reply.

Thanks,

MacRanger

MacRanger’s temporary site is here.

MacRanger believed the hacking attacks were in response to this political ad criticizing Obama’s avowed policy of unilateral disarmament.

0:51 video

The Anchoress pictures the scene in which a poll-sinking prodigy comes hat-in-hand asking for the aid of the man he disrespected.

Jeffrey Bell explains why the left hates Sarah Palin.

From the instant of Palin’s designation on Friday, August 29, the American left went into a collective mass seizure from which it shows no sign of emerging. The left blogosphere and elite media have, for the moment, joined forces and become indistinguishable from each other, and from the supermarket tabloids, in their desire to find and use anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family. In sharp contrast to the yearlong restraint shown toward truthful reports about John Edwards’s affair, bizarre rumors have been reported as news, and, according to McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt, nationally known members of the elite media have besieged him with preposterous demands.

The most striking thing in purely political terms about this hurricane of elite rage is the built-in likelihood that it will backfire.

Read the whole thing.

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And Bill Kristol think it has already backfired.

A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing—but well-received—presentation the following evening.

The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.

By the end of the week, after Palin’s tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren’t being narrow-minded enough. Thus, Hanna Rosin—who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, and has also written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times—lamented in a piece for Slate: “So cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin’s wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison.” I suppose it was ungenerous of conservatives, in our broad-mindedness and tolerance of human frailty, to have let Ms. Rosin down, just when she was counting on us to bring out the tar and feathers. But she gives us too much credit when she suggests we make the liberal media look stuffy and slow-witted. They do that all by themselves.

And it isn’t going to work.

Time Magazine’s Nathan Thornburg finds he likes Sarah Palin’s hometown, and agrees with its residents on the irrelevance of yesterday’s pregnancy story. So will the voters.

I just got off the phone with a longtime Wasilla resident. She had urged me to find time today to go up to Hatcher Pass—”the most beautiful place in the valley!”—when I mentioned that the story on Bristol’s baby is now national news. Her voice slowed. “Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry. That’s so unfair.”

Wasilla seems at times to be utterly without guile. It’s a large part of the town’s charm, and it’s exactly the quality that could make an unorthodox pick like Palin pay off. Don’t get me wrong — she’s a tough politician with sharp enough elbows on her own. But still, she appears to be more steeped in the values of her hometown than any politician I’ve ever come across.

Maybe that means Palin is a little too much Northern Exposure for America—after all, her father’s good friend Curt Menard happily showed me a picture of the governor as a high schooler in 1981, in a root cellar with family and friends, helping skin and cube and cure a whole moose. It’s enough to make you almost miss fake hunters like John Kerry and Mitt Romney.

People in Wasilla are Alaskan tough, so not only does a thing like teen pregnancy not seem like anyone’s damn business, but it’s also not seen as the calamity so many people in the lower 48 might think it is. This is dangerous country — it’s not just the roughneck jobs on cable reality shows. It’s real life here. I listened to the absolutely heartbreaking story of how the godfather of Track Palin, Sarah’s oldest son, died in small plane crash just minutes after having dropped off four kids. Another family invited me into their home and told their incredible story; with one son in Iraq, their other son was working on a conveyor line in Anchorage, got caught in the belt and had his head partially crushed. He lived to stand across the kitchen table from me and his parents, looking fully healed just three months later, grinning at his dumb luck and wondering what comes next in life. “It makes you realize that a thing like a little teenage pregnancy isn’t such a big deal,” his mom said. “Bristol—and lots of other girl like her out there — are going to be just fine.”

If you haven’t guessed yet, the people here are genuinely friendly. Even those in Palin’s inner sanctum who have been told since Friday not to talk to reporters by McCain’s media team, are almost apologetic that they can’t be neighborly and chat, since you came all this way to little Wasilla. And those who can talk, do. All weekend they had the decency not to pretend that they didn’t know the governor’s eldest daughter was pregnant. But they also expected decency in return, that I wouldn’t be the kind of person to make sport out of a young girl’s slip.

The fact is, regardless of what you will hear over the next few days, Bristol’s pregnancy is not a legitimate political issue. Sarah Palin is a longterm member of a group called Feminists for Life, which is not opposed to birth control. So you probably can’t tag her for consigning young people to unwanted pregnancies.

The attempt by the dirtbags of the left to whip this into a scandal will only backfire on them.

Leftwinger Larry Johnson, a former Hillary supporter, has a few apt comments on when family members are and are not appropriately made into political issues. He’s right about the clowns at Kos and the turncoat poofter Andrew Sullivan, too.

Did you catch Barack Obama threatening to fire “his” people if they are helping fan the flames about the preganancy of the Republican Vice Presidential candidate’s 17 year old daughter? Families, so he says, are not fair game.

So, why do you think Barack came out on this? Because immediate internal polling is running very negative against the Obama campaign, which is perceived as pushing the Bristol pregnancy story. They are being painted as bullies and hypocrites. Most Americans, especially those bitter white folks clinging to God and guns, view this as a private matter and none of the media’s business.

For starters, anyone who is 21 years of age or less should not be a target of any campaign. Attacking a 17 year old girl and spreading vicious lies, as have the clowns at Kos and Andrew Sullivan (just to name two of the more prominent offenders) is beyond the pale. Family members who are over 21 are fair game if they are using the fame of their parent, spouse, or relative to make a buck or get an advantage. I think the views and actions of a spouse also are relevant if the man or woman has engaged in conduct such as hurling racial epithets or promoting policies that most Americans reject.

I think it is noteworthy that Sarah Palin’s husband resigned his job in the Oil and Gas industry in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety while Michelle Obama used her husband’s position to enrich herself. She got a job she would not have if her husband had not been a player in the Chicago political machine. To that extent I think the actions and words of spouses are relevant and potentially important.

In the case of John Edwards, as in the case of John Kerry before him, as in the affair of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky still earlier, the mainstream media refrained from investigating or reporting unpleasant stories about their favored political leaders until widespread dissemination by alternative sources made the stories impossible to overlook.

Tom Maguire observes that Jerome Corsi, who wrote the book (Unfit for Command) which helped the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth sink John Kerry’s presidential hopes, has a new very recent book, The Obama Nation , currently ranking 7th in sales on Amazon. I’ve ordered a copy myself.

Tom mentions that Glenn Reynolds has been wondering what skeletons has Obama got in his personal closet that the media has so far been unwilling to investigate. The Corsi book is likely to point to a few, and that means the serious scrutiny of Barack Obama’s personal history, career, finances, and associations has only just begun.
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For example, one of Tom Maguire’s commenters reports that the relationship between the Obamas and 1960s radicals William Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn was clearly rather more intimate than Obama himself represented in his “”a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago” dismissive description. He says that, to his personal knowledge, the Ayres babysat the Obama children.

Peter Wehner really does a marvelous job of demolishing Andrew Sullivan’s pretensions to any kind of moral authority, merely by contrasting Sullivan’s current anti-Iraq-war diatribes with what Sullivan was saying five and six years ago.

Sullivan has changed sides too frequently and too frivolously to be taken seriously in his favorite pose of lone, small voice of integrity.

Lord knows, I don’t often agree with ultra-left blogger Glenn Greenwald about anything, but what do you know? Even the most unlikely of occurrences are possible in this best of all possible worlds.

Here’s Glenn responding to the recent Rasmussen Poll finding national approval of Congress to have fallen to an all-time low of 9% by concluding the democrat House majority is safe in perpetuity and it’s time for moonbats to turn on the democrat party leadership and start defeating any democrat congressmen discernibly to the right of Leon Trotsky.

That’ll learn ‘em. And those democrat leaders will then start obediently toeing the Party Line (and I don’t mean the democrat party line).

Many progressives and other Democratic supporters are reflexively opposed to any conduct that might result in the defeat of even a single, relatively inconsequential Democratic member of Congress or the transfer of even a single district to GOP control. No matter how dissatisfied such individuals might be with the Democratic Congress, they are unwilling to do anything different to change what they claim to find so unsatisfactory. Even though uncritically cheering on any and every candidate with a “D” after his or her name has resulted in virtually nothing positive—and much that is negative—many progressives continue, rather bafflingly and stubbornly, to insist that if they just keep doing the same thing (cheering for the election of more and more Democrats), then somehow, someday, something different might occur. But, as the cliché teaches, repeatedly engaging in the same conduct and expecting different results is the very definition of foolishness.

As foolish as it is, this intense aversion to jeopardizing any Democratic incumbents might be considered rational if doing so carried the risk of restoring Republican control of Congress. But there is no such risk, and there will be none for the foreseeable future. No matter what happens, the Democrats, by all accounts, are going to control both houses of Congress after the 2008 election. Their margin in the House, which is currently 31 seats, will, by even the most conservative estimates, increase to at least 50 seats. No advertising campaign or activist group could possibly swing control of Congress to the Republicans this year, and—given the Brezhnev-era-like reelection rates for incumbents in America—it is extremely unlikely that the House will be controlled by anyone other than Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi for years to come.

The critical question, then, is not who will control Congress. The Democrats will. That is a given. The vital question is what they will do with that control—specifically, will they continue to maintain and increase their own power by accommodating the right, or will they be more responsive, accountable and attentive to the political values of their base?

As long as they know that progressives will blindly support their candidates no matter what they do, then it will only be rational for congressional Democrats to ignore progressives and move as far to the right as they can. With the blind, unconditional support of Democrats securely in their back pocket, Democratic leaders will quite rationally conclude that the optimal way to increase their own power, to transform more Republican districts into Blue Dog Democratic seats, and thereby make themselves more secure in their leadership positions, is to move their caucus to the right. Because the principal concern of Democratic leaders is to maintain and increase their own power, they will always do what they perceive is most effective in achieving that goal, which right now means moving their caucus to the right to protect their Blue Dogs and elect new ones.

That is precisely what has happened over the past two years. It is why a functional right-wing majority has dominated the House notwithstanding the change of party control—and the change in direction—that American voters thought they were mandating in 2006. As progressive activist Matt Stoller put it, “Blue Dogs are the swing voting block in the House, they are self-described conservatives, and they are perfectly willing to use their status on every action considered by the House.” The more the Democratic leadership accommodates the Blue Dog caucus—the more their power relies upon expanding their numbers through the increase of Blue Dog seats—the less relevant will be the question of which party controls Congress.

The linchpin for that destructive strategy is uncritical progressive support for congressional Democrats. That is what ensures that Democratic leaders will continue to pursue a rightward-moving strategy as the key to consolidating their own power. Right now, when it comes time to decide whether to capitulate to the demands of the right, Beltway Democrats think: “If we capitulate, that is one less issue the GOP can use to harm our Blue Dogs.” And they have no countervailing consideration to weigh against that, because they perceive—accurately—that there is no cost to capitulating, only benefits from doing so, because progressives will blindly support their candidates no matter what they do. That is the strategic calculus that must change if the behavior of Democrats in Congress is to change.

Democratic leaders must learn that they cannot increase their majority in Congress by trampling on the political values of their own base.

Let’s hope the entire nutroots base, responds to Glenn in the manner of Molly Bloom:

I was a Flower of the mountains yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him and yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

Typical Daily Kos commenter delivers a
well-reasoned rejoinder.

Daniel Libit discusses one of the curious features of the blogosphere, what he refers to as “the Commentocracy,” the critical mass of enthusiastic participants who not only read some of the most influential blogs (on both the left and the right), but who impact the political debate with their own contributions, some thoughtful and of high quality and others vulgar, violent, and obscene.

It’s not unusual these days for prominent commenters to develop their own readership, and to go on to become regular contributors to the blogs where they have been habituees, or to proceed to found new blogs of their own.

A certain number of blogs, in my opinion, tend to rely on the vehemence of their commenters’ responses to shield them from criticism or rebuttal. A hooting posse of blogospheric sycophants is virtually de rigeur on the left, but there are some conservative blogs which are also known to contain a comment mob.

Ann Althouse, responds to James Risen’s New York Times story on the left blogosphere’s recent conniption fit over Obama’s flipflop on FISA Telecom immunity:

You can’t please everybody, and if you want to be President, you really can’t please Greenwald, Hamsher, and Kos. Obama is taking the right position now, and he should defend it frankly.

The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.

Suspicions about Sen. Obama’s true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party’s losing tradition.

“Barack Obama seems to be making a very calculated attempt to win over 270 electoral votes,” wrote liberal blogger Carol Foyler at LibDemWatch.com, a blog read by a half-dozen other liberal bloggers. “He must be stopped.”

We’re beginning to understand why Barack Obama keeps protesting so vigorously against the prospect of “George Bush’s third term.” Maybe he’s worried that someone will notice that he’s the candidate who’s running for it.

Most Presidential candidates adapt their message after they win their party nomination, but Mr. Obama isn’t merely “running to the center.” He’s fleeing from many of his primary positions so markedly and so rapidly that he’s embracing a sizable chunk of President Bush’s policy. Who would have thought that a Democrat would rehabilitate the much-maligned Bush agenda?

Take the surveillance of foreign terrorists. Last October, while running with the Democratic pack, the Illinois Senator vowed to “support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies” that assisted in such eavesdropping after 9/11. As recently as February, still running as the liberal favorite against Hillary Clinton, he was one of 29 Democrats who voted against allowing a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee reform of surveillance rules even to come to the floor.

Two weeks ago, however, the House passed a bill that is essentially the same as that Senate version, and Mr. Obama now says he supports it. Apparently legal immunity for the telcos is vital for U.S. national security, just as Mr. Bush has claimed. Apparently, too, the legislation isn’t an attempt by Dick Cheney to gut the Constitution. Perhaps it is dawning on Mr. Obama that, if he does become President, he’ll be responsible for preventing any new terrorist attack. So now he’s happy to throw the New York Times under the bus.

Next up for Mr. Obama’s political blessing will be Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy. Only weeks ago, the Democrat was calling for an immediate and rapid U.S. withdrawal. When General David Petraeus first testified about the surge in September 2007, Mr. Obama was dismissive and skeptical. But with the surge having worked wonders in Iraq, this week Mr. Obama went out of his way to defend General Petraeus against MoveOn.org’s attacks in 2007 that he was “General Betray Us.” Perhaps he had a late epiphany.

Look for Mr. Obama to use his forthcoming visit to Iraq as an excuse to drop those withdrawal plans faster than he can say Jeremiah Wright “was not the person that I met 20 years ago.” The Senator will learn – as John McCain has been saying – that withdrawal would squander the gains from the surge, set back Iraqi political progress, and weaken America’s strategic position against Iran. Our guess is that he’ll spin this switcheroo as some kind of conditional commitment, saying he’ll stay in Iraq as long as Iraqis are making progress on political reconciliation, and so on. As things improve in Iraq, this would be Mr. Bush’s policy too.

Mr. Obama has also made ostentatious leaps toward Mr. Bush on domestic issues. While he once bid for labor support by pledging a unilateral rewrite of Nafta, the Democrat now says he favors free trade as long as it works for “everybody.” His economic aide, Austan Goolsbee, has been liberated from the five-month purdah he endured for telling Canadians that Mr. Obama’s protectionism was merely campaign rhetoric. Now that Mr. Obama is in a general election, he can’t scare the business community too much.

Back in the day, the first-term Senator also voted against the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But last week he agreed with their majority opinion in the Heller gun rights case, and with their dissent against the liberal majority’s ruling to ban the death penalty for rape. Mr. Obama seems to appreciate that getting pegged as a cultural lefty is deadly for national Democrats – at least until November.

Obama supporters exploited a Google policy (reporting them as spam sources) to get anti-Obama Hillary supporters’ blogs shut down.

Blogasm

Larry Johnson lists victims and their new locations.

Andrew Sullivan commends to our attention this Indian music video, with subtitles attempting to capture its apparently ?English-language? lyrics.

4:39 video

Patterico:

In a slightly ironic twist, the AP is taking content from a blog site. Namely, mine.

In a news item about the e-mail from Judge Kozinski’s wife that I posted on this site, an AP article lifted numerous passages.

I counted 154 words quoted from my post. That’s almost twice the number of words contained in the most extensive quotation in the Drudge Retort.

He should send Michelle Malkin to collect. Michelle is tough, and she’s a wizard with figures.
———————————————-

AP crackdown on bloggers posting

The Chicago Tribune is attempting to innoculate readers against the possibility that the rumor published by Larry Johnson of a tape of Michelle Obama ranting about “Whitey” may turn out to be true.

It’s hard to come up with an ethnic slur that has less of a sting than “whitey.”

A prevalent yet unsubstantiated Internet rumor has it that Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, used this term at some point in a speech, and the Obama campaign is concerned enough to have posted an online rebuttal.

I’ve got to ask, though. Are there really white people out there so ignorant of history, so unaware of the nuances of language and so threatened by minority grievances that they take genuine umbrage at the term “whitey”?

More a taunt than a threat, the word has no ugly history and hints at no particular stereotypes. It may have been hurled in a menacing fashion in ugly personal confrontations from time to time, but it’s never been used to keep a people down, to put them in their place, to rank them as subhuman.

To be truly offensive, a derogatory term needs to have an ominous context that “whitey” lacks.

Those who take offense are confusing prejudice—which is making negative assumptions about people based solely on external characteristics, of which all races and ethnicities are guilty—with racism, which is prejudice in action.

It requires them to imagine that “whitey” marginalizes, diminishes and therefore harms white people.

And if they’re really that dumb, then I guess they deserve to be insulted.

So there!

They really lit Jeff Goldstein’s fuse with this one. Jeff retorts:

So yeah. It looks like an Obama presidency will give us a frank discussion on the issue of race. If by “frank” we mean, “shut up and quit you’re bitching, whitey. We’ll tell you what racism is.”

Read his whole Don’t call me nigger, Whitey.

Kevin Drum is experiencing a bit of schadenfreude at Hillary Clinton’s expense this morning.

....It turns out that Barack Obama’s hiring of Patti Solis Doyle is even more interesting than I thought at first. Perhaps because I deliberately pulled back from campaign coverage during the final couple of months after Texas and Ohio, I didn’t realize that Solis Doyle had become so estranged from Hillary Clinton after she was fired as Hillary’s campaign manager. Far from her hiring being a conciliatory gesture, the developing conventional wisdom is that Team Obama is sending the same kind of message to Team Clinton that the Tattaglia family sent to the Corleones in The Godfather:

“It’s a slap in the face,” Susie Tompkins Buell, a prominent Clinton backer, said in an interview. “Why would they put somebody that was so clearly ineffective in such a position? It’s a message. We get it.” She said it was a “calculated decision” by the Obama team to “send a message that she [Clinton] is not being considered for the ticket.”

Other Clinton insiders also seethed. “Who can blame Obama for rewarding Patti? He would never be the nominee without her,” one person who has worked for both Clintons and remains close to them said. The sentiment reflected what another person in the immediate Clinton orbit described as “shock” that Obama would send such a strong signal that he is not considering Clinton as his running mate so soon.

Another Hillary supporter puts it even more bluntly: Hiring Solis is the “biggest f*** you I have ever seen in politics.”

And he’s not alone. The whole left side of the blogosphere is buzzing like a beehive over this one.

The Associated Press cracked down Friday on an obscure blog, titled the Drudge Retort (evidently a leftwing parody of Matt Drudge), having invented its own draconian version of a Fair Use Policy, amounting essentially to no use. AP ordered Drudge Retort to remove seven items which quoted between 39 and 79 words of AP articles.

(Note: the last paragraph’s two sentences fall well within the range of quotation AP proposed to forbid, amounting to 55 words.)

Faced with mounting criticism, and a proposed boycott, AP behaved in a self-contradictory fashion, announcing that it was “re-thinkng” its policy and would suspend its attacks on blogs, but AP also said it would not withdraw its demand to the Drudge Retort to remove the seven postings, and suggested short summaries of AP stories be used instead of actual quotations.

New York Times 6/16

Newshoggers’ Boycott emblem:

Michael Arrington (Tech Crunch)’s Boycott Emblem:

Tech Crunch announced:

Here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.

Larry Lessig:

What I mean by “the Kozinski mess” is the total inability of the media—including we, the media, bloggers—to get the basic facts right, and keep the reality in perspective. The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear travel – and our need is for a better developed immunity (in the sense of immunity from a virus) from this sort of garbage.

Here are the facts as I’ve been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski’s son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it.

A lawyer (Cyrus Sanai) who has long had a grudge against Judge Kozinski finds out that the Kozinski family has a network server with various files on it. The controversial files on that server aren’t linked to from the Web, and aren’t indexed on search engines. They are generally meant only for family members and a few other people who get specific pointers to them.

But the lawyer figures out the private server’s internal directory structure, rummages around, finds some of the files, and downloads them. And some of the files contain what is basically — if what I saw at Patterico’s site is representative — visual sexual humor. There are some spoofs, for instance of the MasterCard commercials, some puns, some absurdities. Kozinski, or someone in his family, apparently got them sent to him, and decided to save them alongside a bunch of other stuff he found interesting or amusing.

Now the fruit of this disgruntled lawyer’s rummaging through someone else’s personal files somehow becomes a national news story. Why? Because Kozinski is presiding over an obscenity trial? All this stuff — the sort of sexual humor that gets circulated all the time — is not remotely in the same league as what the defendant is being criminally prosecuted for. Recall that the defendant is being prosecuted precisely because his sex-and-defecation movies are so far out even by modern standards of actual pornography. Sanai’s discoveries are similar to someone’s finding that a judge who’s presiding over a drunk driving trial has some screw-top bottles of rosé wine in his cupboard at home, shamelessly displayed in a way that the whole world can see them, if the whole world stands on its tiptoes and peers through a back window. The news value of that would be what, exactly? (Yes, I know screw-tops are becoming legit, but pretend it’s ten years ago.)

OK, people are saying, it was careless of Kozinski not to make sure that the site (which was apparently managed by one of Kozinski’s grown sons) was properly secured. Sure, in retrospect, whenever something leads to this sort of media circus, by definition one would have been wise to take more care to prevent it. But surely even otherwise reasonable people might fail to plan for their enemies’ rummaging around through the files on a private family server.

It’s kind of like your parking your car on the street, locking it, but forgetting to close a back window — or like your throwing out something in the trash without shredding it and leaving the trash cans by the curb. Then someone who has a grudge against you comes by and starts using the open window to rummage around in the stuff you have piled up in the back seat, or starts rummaging through your trash. (Note that to my knowledge such rummaging probably isn’t even a crime in many places.)

Lo and behold, one of the items your enemy finds is a notebook in which you’ve pasted some visual sex jokes that people have sent you. He takes pictures of all the pages and then runs to the newspaper; because of your high-profile job, the newspapers all cover this. Should you have closed the back window? Should you have shredded the stuff before putting in the trash? In retrospect, sure. But how many of us live like that in everything we do?

Jeez, folks, Kozinski has a quirky sense of humor, and keeps some joke pictures and videos on his computer rather than throwing them away. I’m sure they aren’t the kinds of things some people would enjoy seeing. But he wasn’t trying to show them to those people! He was just minding his own business, keeping some files on his own private server. And now it’s a national news story.

What little evenhandedness exists in the mainstream media is found in the willingness of the press to report the substance of Republican attacks on democrat presidential candidates in the interested manner of an old-time radio broadcaster describing a heavyweight boxing match. “The Swift Boat Veterans just delivered a powerful right to John Kerry’s jaw, and he’s on the canvas!”

Conservatives like myself are always surprised, what with all the favoritism in coverage they get, that the left continually expresses outrage and indignation that the mainstream media is only 99% on their side. They know that they deserve 1000% support.

Well, the left is mad at the media, and they’re not going to take it anymore. From now on, you journalists mess with their candidate, and they are going to mess with you.

Media Matters reports.

The Associated Press last week got a preview of how this presidential season is going to unfold, and how online liberal activists aren’t going to stand down when the press takes cheap shots at Democratic front-runners.

After AP reporter Nedra Pickler wrote a news story highlighting how some fringe Republican operatives were raising questions about Sen. Barack Obama’s patriotism, angry readers dispatched nearly 15,000 electronic letters protesting the piece. Why? Because instead of providing balance and context, which is what good journalism does, the article simply offered a platform for Obama’s opponents to roll out their smears, to broadcast their dark doubts about the senator’s character.

That kind of media shortcoming has become predictable; reporters love to quote partisan Republicans about how deficient Democrats are. And in the past it would have likely produced angry denunciations online within the liberal blogosphere—a blog swarm, perhaps. ...

But nearly 15,000 letters sent in just a matter of days in response to a single news wire article? That’s something else entirely and could mark the dawn of a new era in progressive media activism. The phenomenon has received very little mainstream media attention (journalists probably don’t want to encourage this sort of thing), but make no mistake: It was a very big deal.

Hat tip to LGF.

New Republic’s Dana Goldstein describes the war between Clinton and Obama supporters in the blogosphere.

These people are not pretty when they’re angry.

As anybody with high-speed Internet knows, MyDD and Daily Kos sit at the top of the liberal Netroots movement, which over the last five years has made astonishing strides in its campaign to transform the Democratic Party into a hard-fighting, proudly liberal, and, most importantly, victorious entity. Though their websites offer distinct communities and commentaries, and though they have very different personalities, MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong (a former astrologer) and Kos’s Markos Moulitsas (a former Army man) have always gotten along—the two co-authored a 2006 book, Crashing the Gate, about the rise of their movement. Their bond has been rooted mostly in common foes: Republicans, namby-pamby Democrats, the Iraq War, divisive “identity politics,” and the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. But the harmony that existed between MyDD and Kos since the birth of the Netroots no longer exists today, and a bitter internecine struggle within the progressive blogosphere is to blame. Just as bilious in tone as previous fights with Republicans or Joe Lieberman, it has revealed fault lines in the movement that will be tough to cover back up. There have been charges of misogyny and of bullying, and some longtime members have walked away from their cause altogether. And what’s at the heart of it all is that most loaded of questions: Barack or Hillary?

The Netroots have been arguing about the 2008 campaign since the day after John Kerry lost, but the debate turned ugly when Armstrong revealed his vote in the February 12 Virginia primary. “In the end, what compelled me to vote for Clinton was looking at someone that seemed practical about the battle we have on our hands and looking ready to engage in the fight,” Armstrong blogged that day. “I’d rather be part of the fight than be told to stay on the sidelines because I’m too partisan.”

Armstrong had long voiced concerns that Obama’s campaign was too personality-driven and too reliant on the votes of Independents and Republicans. But his official endorsement made readers go ballistic. “Voting for the DLC candidate makes you part of the fight? Come on,” wrote one commenter. Another suggested, “If you aren’t a part of her campaign, you really oughta try to sign up and get some of those $$$ while you can”—a dig at Armstrong’s past campaign work for politicians like Howard Dean, Jon Corzine, and Mark Warner. A group of far nastier comments were deleted.

At Daily Kos, commenters were ripping Armstrong to shreds. One user wrote, “MyDD isn’t even a pro-Clinton site these days. It’s just a toxic waste dump dedicated to throwing slime at Obama and hoping it sticks. ... I know that Kos and Jerome are friends and partners, but it’s perhaps time for Kos to reconsider linking to MyDD from the DK blogroll.”

Clintonites and Obamabots were ferrying between the two sites, “recommending” posts sympathetic to their favored candidate (thus ensuring more prominent placement on the page), and brutally attacking one another in the comment sections. In late March, Armstrong, upset by name-calling between Clinton and Obama supporters on MyDD, barred new user accounts on the site for a week. The sense of betrayal among fellow Netrooters after his Clinton endorsement was palpable. Armstrong was backing a candidate who, as Chris Bowers, another leading lefty blogger, wrote on Open Left, hadn’t fully rejected the DLC, hadn’t opposed the Iraq war from the start, hadn’t offered overwhelming support for Net Neutrality, and hadn’t campaigned in small caucus states.

Andrew Sullivan’s brain seems to have turned still more completely into mush, as he quotes approvingly this message from a younger reader on the Left.

Your old farts really do miss the point completely, don’t they? These younger people were convinced that political involvement was useless because the system was so broken. They came of age anywhere from the second Clinton term (Lewinsky) through the disaster of the Bush years. They have no reason to believe that politics can work, or that it is possible to effect any large scale change, so they work locally or just opt out.

This is what Obama has tapped into. The reason all those thousands of young Dems registered for the first time and voted in a primary was because he made them believe honorable politics was possible. And if someone like Obama gets chewed up by the system because the forces arrayed against him are too strong—just look at the sworn enemies who are teaming up to bring him down, united by nothing more than a vested interest in the status quo—then they will conclude that the system is as broken as they thought it was.

The mistake is reading this as an Obama personality cult, in which case “grow up” would be appropriate. But the Obamaniacs I meet are nothing like that…

they don’t sing his praises, they sing their own. They are intoxicated by the idea of a politics where things they thought were not possible become possible, and people talk to each other like adults. They don’t think he’s going to fix things, they think they are.

What the old farts might want to consider is that these young people who have no particular vested interest in the current system might be seeing the rot much more clearly than the fogeys who have been entangled in it for decades. And the mature folk might want to accept that the burden of proof is on them to show why such a viscerally disgusting political game is worth playing.

Opting out of that is not immaturity, it’s intelligence.

Let’s see. These kiddies figured that if they registered to vote and campaigned for a leftist candidate, the Archangel Gabriel would show up and blow his horn, human nature would totally and completely change, the two party system and all opposition to immediate Socialism would vanish, and they would be able to do exactly as they pleased. After all, they deserve nothing less, being finer and better people and more sensitive and intelligent human beings than any other group of people or any generation which has ever lived. And if they don’t get the total and complete political gratification they are entitled to (on the basis of their youth and overall marvelousness) in this their first election, well! that will certainly prove that the American system is fatally broken and irredeemably corrupt, and they should simply opt out.

I certainly agree with the last part, as I don’t think young people so unsophisticated and self-infatuated have much of anything useful to contribute to the American political dialogue anyway.

I really wanted to blog about the Village Voice’s review of the Conservative Blogosphere, but (sigh!) all my efforts to find something quotable or amusing in their Onanastic efforts failed. The whole thing was simply too lame to live. Its low point had be its typical mindlessly-conformist leftwing author striking Olympian poses and rating people like Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnson, and John Hinderaker as such percentage stupid versus such percentage evil.

Armed Liberal has it right:

The author is Roy Edroso from the ever-wise alicublog...and aside from being a juvenile jackass, he’s a tool. Why? Because while nonsense like this is great for making the 15% of True Believers feel Really Really Good about themselves, it makes the other 36% that we on the left need to do things like – you know, win elections – pretty pissed off at the smug arrogance that’s so proudly on display.

And it’s timely, because Obama’s perceived invulnerability is being rattled by the fact that he dropped the mask at least rhetorically in Bittergate.

Look, I’m not sure why urban intellectuals feel so disrespected as a class, and why they have such a chip on their shoulder. But you know what?

We’re in an election cycle where the GOP candidate should be staked out like a sacrificial goat waiting for the knife. Instead, we get Democratic thinkers worrying – appropriately – that the Democratic candidate is going to actually lose in November. And one of the big reasons is that the public voice of the Party is cranky, smug yuppies.

The SF Chronicle describes how Obama’s famous “bitter” condescending remarks were captured by an enterprising (Vassar ‘68) Huffington Post blogger.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has been in full damage control mode since the senator’s blunt remarks about the nature of small town Pennsylvania voters were secretly recorded by a Huffington Post blogger at a recent San Francisco fundraiser that was supposed to be off limits to the press.

Obama, asked last Sunday why it was so hard for him to reach blue-collar voters, said that many had been overlooked economically and that “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton pounced on the comment over the weekend, calling it “elitist and divisive.”

An Obama campaign insider tells us the blogger, Mayhill Fowler, had tried to get into one of two Obama fundraising events in the Bay Area a couple of months back where former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley stood in as a proxy.

She was turned away, even though she had offered to pay, says our source.

“There’s a very basic (fundraiser) rule – you don’t let press in, and anyone with an interest in reporting shouldn’t get in,” said the source.

Just how the MP3 – wielding Fowler managed to secure an invite to the $1,000 a head fundraiser at the San Francisco home of developer Alex Mehran wasn’t immediately clear – but Obama campaign higher-ups were said to be livid, with fingers pointing at a local fundraising consultant for the slip-up.

There should be a special award for bloggers like Charles Johnson (who debunked the Dan Rather forged National Guard letter in 2004), and Mayhill Fowler, who this year exposed the views about the common people that Barack Obama shared with a wealthy audience at a private fund-raiser held atop San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, whose reporting of the truth makes a significant impact on the course of Presidential Election contest.

The MSM and the blogosphere has moved on from unimportant subjects like Islamic terrorism and the upcoming presidential election to what really matters: Is that really a babe reflected in Dick Cheney’s fishing shades?

McClatchy:

Since Wednesday, the blogosphere has been atwitter over a photograph on the White House Web site of Cheney with a caption that said he was fly-fishing on the Snake River in Idaho.

The photo is a tight shot of Cheney’s face sporting dark sunglasses and his trademark grin.

What’s stirring all the buzz is the reflection in the vice president’s dark glasses. Some thought that the reflection looked like a naked woman and, this being Cheney and this being the Internet Age, they immediately shared that thought with the world.

In a Google search for the words “Dick Cheney” and “sunglasses,” 79,300 hits came back at mid-afternoon on Thursday. By 7 p.m., the count was 130,000.

On DemocraticUnderground.com, the discussion starts with this question: “Notice anything … interesting … reflected in his sunglasses? Something that has little to do with conventional ‘fly-fishing’?”

Photographers discuss.

The New York Times warns of the latest occupational health peril: blogging.

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

When Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin (who each do about five or ten times the work most of the rest of us do) start falling over, then I will begin to worry.

Michelle Malkin wants to raise your consciousness.

Professorfate, at Daily Kos, proposes a lesson for Americans.

As a nation the United States no longer has the remotest idea about what it really feels like to be part of a war zone. Americans have lost the empathy that is necessary to make an informed, meaningful, compassionate decision about whether or not war should be waged. While candidates fight over who has the required experience to properly oversee our republic’s international interests, none realize that none of them have ever felt what it is like to have war waged in their neighborhood and occupied by intruders. While they may claim to know when to wage wars and to know the horrors of war, they only know them intellectually. They can’t claim that they have emotionally felt them. No one who was born and raised in the United States can claim that and none can really feel it. We have allowed a Congress and an administration to encourage hate and to hi-jack our compassion. In fact, as a nation we have lost our compassion.

Unfortunately, America is at a point that to be able to really feel again, to regain that compassion, it needs to be invaded and occupied in the same way that we have invaded and occupied Iraq.

I think myself that Professorfate ought to advance that kind of thesis somewhere in the real America. There are a lot of people around who have a moral lesson to share with him.

H/T to SavannahWinslow via Charles Johnson.

Pro-Clinton Kos Kid Alegre declared herself on strike from Daily Kos, frustrated at management’s refusal to enforce standards of civility or factuality with respect to postings attacking Hillary.

Gateway Pundit offers a screen capture of a portion of the flung feces representing the typical negative response the Kos community.

Kos himself was unsympathetic. He told ABC’s Jake Tapper:

First, these people should read up on the definition of ‘strike.’ What they’re doing is a ‘boycott.’ But whatever they call it, I think it’s great. It’s a big Internet, so I hope they find what they’re looking for.”

The conflict between Obama and Clinton supporters has already become bitter and ugly, and there is every reason to expect that things will only grow worse through the convention.

Linda Hirschman found out the hard way that diversity of opinion is just not the democrat netroots way. If you want to retain your posting privileges, you have to follow the party line. There are no independent perspectives on the left.

Andrew Sullivan thinks the democrats have arrived at the moment in the horror film when the evil monster has been killed and the audience breathes a sigh of relief, but…

We’re at that moment in the campaign that reminds me of a horror movie. There’s a kind of relief that the worst cannot happen, that the Clintons are politically dead, that our long national nightmare is over. The screen falls silent. We look at pleasant images: green grass, or a kitchen table scene, or a calm lovers’ embrace. But you know they have something left. They could come suddenly screaming back, like that hand out of the grave in Carrie or Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction. An Edwards endorsement? A March surprise?

Like Freddy or Jason, they still lurk, ready to pounce again. And the credits are yet to roll. Gulp.