I haven't jumped in on the theme of the current round of attacks on Liberal Blogostan that have been a hot topic the last few days. David "BoBo" Brooks made the Daily Kos Conspiracy a "respectable" line of attack by his Sunday New York Times column.
Of course, BoBo's column was, shall we say, seemingly lacking in rigorous journalistic standards. Hey, doesn't the New York Times edit these things before they go in the newspaper? ROFLMAO - I couldn't resist a Judith Miller joke there.
Lots of bloggers in the reality-based community have responded with ridicule. Which is appropriate, because the charges are ridiculous. I think my favorite humorous take on it came from Matt Yglesias (okay, it's an article, but he's a prolific blogger):
In short, there's an enemy out there who lurks. A grave and gathering threat to the republic - indeed, to Western Civilization itself. The enemy is not, of course, precisely the same as previous totalitarian foes. While Communism and Nazism posed threats through control of powerful states, the blogofascist menace is, like its Islamofascist counterpart, more of a loose network of highly motivated individuals. The blogosphere itself is primarily organized around a cell structure, with any given node (or "website" to use the Pashto term) linked to a number of other nodes through a so-called "blog roll." The network is, however, capable of reconfiguring itself both through periodic revisions of the roll and through more transient links embedded in individual blog "posts." The posts themselves are encoded in hypertext markup language, making them difficult to decipher without a web browser or equivalent tool. Further deepening the dilemma, several of the largest and most sophisticated nodes have multiple authors, sometimes operating under pseudonyms.
Billmon discusses why this looks like a new twist in the Party line for defenders of Dear Leader Bush in The Swiftboating of Kos 06/26/06.
Lots of bloggers have also made the observation that the leading liberal/Democratic blogs tend to be center-left, i.e., not more sinister lefties, whatever those may be. It doesn't matter much, though. Even the most moderate Democrat is going to be denounced by the True Believers of the Christian Republican White People's Party as crazy leftwingers and worse. The extreme nastiness of their political polemics is one of the hallmarks of today's Jim Crow Republican Party. So why waste our breath saying, "Oh, no, I'm not one of those bad Democrats"? That just tells the trolls that should be even nastier. That's what happened to Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks when she made a mildly critical comment about Dear Leader in 2003 and the superpatriots went after her. But she learned pretty quickly.
And maybe the political-junkie part of my brain has just gotten jaded about that kind of thing. So I don't feel the need to find left-wingers to trash in order to define myself as a safe centrist or whatever. I'm a Jacksonian Democrat (as in Andrew). For me, that means that my general political perspective is that I'm for Labor, human rights and the rule of law, and against preventive wars, destructive plutocrats, the Unilateral Executive theory of unlimited Presidential power and global warming.
Some of the things I emphasize are out of the "mainstream", like the fact that I continually talk about the invasion of Iraq as a war crime and the general attention I give to international-law issues, especially around the Iraq War. I don't care if it's "mainstream" or not. It may be far-fetched to think of Dick Cheney and George Bush in front of the International Criminal Court. But, then, who would have thought that the mightiest military in the history of the world (add as many elaborations as you like) would be stymied by a few thousand guerrillas in Iraq? Surprising things sometimes happen.
On the other hand, I spend quite a bit of time reading military strategy papers and journal articles from Pentagon sites. Two of the people that I quote most often, and that I would say influence my thinking about military affairs, are Andrew Bacevich, who describes himself as a political conservative, and Anthony Cordesman, who actually supports Bush's "stay the course" Iraq War policy.
But zealous war supporters and Christian Right nationalists and Republicans who think the Holy Grail would be to abolish Social Security don't care whether I'm "nuanced" or occasionally "counter-intuitive". So I just don't worry about it much. I look for good ideas and sound analysis whereever I can find them. Although, Zeus knows, it's hard to find either from true-believer Republican sources! And I'm pretty sure that I don't write much that Republican neosegregationist types would cheer for.
One of the fad concepts in the 1960s was "co-optation", that's kinda-sorta related to the concept of "selling out". Although after the DotCom boom of the 1990s when everyone's dream was to start a company and sell it to someone for megaprofits, I'm not sure "selling out" carries quite the negative connotation that it once did.
And as much as the Christian Soldiers of the Jim Crow GOP would like to crush out Liberal Blogostan, the real threat to the democratic potential of the blogosphere is co-optation. Exactly what blogocooptation would look like, I can't quite picture. Because the attempts to do it up until now haven't been that successful in defanging its potential for injecting critical perspectives into the political conversation. Like the major media outlet blogs that tried to mimic their own worst stereotypes of the snotty, arrogant, trivial blogosphere.
So let's enjoy it while the specter to Co-optation is still only creeping around the edges. If the printing press could span the Protestant Reformation, the blogosphere may still have some substantial contributions to make.
