I Can’t Hear You

by digby

Via Atrios, I see that the timorous press is calling for the smelling salts again. In the comments of the post in question, we see the following exchange:

Mr. Ververs,

I noticed you gave four examples of lack of civility by the blogosphere:

1. Michelle Malkin complaining about those evil liberals.
2. Joe Klein complaining about those evil liberals.
3. Nathan Gardels complaining about those evil liberals.
4. Deborah Howell complaining about those evil liberals.

Bo234
————————————————————————————
Bo234,

I just went with the most recent examples I was aware of to talk about it in general terms. I welcome your additions of other examples. I certainly don’t believe this is an issue either side has a monopoly on but it does seem to be louder on one side than the other at the moment. Again, feel free to correct me.

Ok. Let’s go over this again, shall we? Let us stipulate that the left blogosphere is a bunch of shrieking freaks who have completely lost our marbles. We are rude, crude and out of control. But louder than the other side? Because of some blogswarms? If only.

For the last twenty years we have had your rightwing radio, your rightwing TV, your rightwing publishing, your rightwing speakers bureaus and your rightwing magazines and your rightwing pulpits. Then you have your imbalanced panels on news shows, your intermarried politicos and journalists and your faux liberal punditocrisy. Yet, our little blogswarms have the entire journalistic establishment all atwitter, wondering what has happened to the discourse?

The entire DC establishment went stark raving bonkers for eight years, followed by nearly five years of a kind of courtier sycophancy we haven’t seen since Louis XVI. I do not know the explanation for why this happened, although I have my suspicions. (The question brings out almost as many possibilities as “why did we invade Iraq?”) But it happened. I saw it with my own eyes. Now they decide that something’s gone wrong?

Are we “louder” now? Certainly. We were veritably silent before. But the entire rightwing media infrastructure still spews out its disgusting bile on a daily basis. perhaps the sound of it has become so familiar to those who live and work in Washington that they no longer hear it. To those of us in the “fever swamp” it is a little alarming. On 6/6/06, Ann Coulter will release her new book about liberals called “Godless.” This is on the heels of Ramesh Ponnuru’s new one called “The Party of Death.” Hannity’s last book was called “Deliver us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism”.

You see, the real difference between the Right blogoshpere and the Left is that the Left blogosphere is angry at the ideology and governance of the Republican party and the media who report on it. We believe the political press has been complicit where it has not been weak and we are taking our complaint directly to them, loudly and in no uncertain terms. It’s angry and vitriolic, but it’s political.

The right blogosphere, on the other hand, is no longer outraged at the Democratic party. They think they are clowns — they can barely get off a good Teddy Kennedy joke before nodding off. And except for the war correspondents whom they believe are cowardly and are refusing to report the good news in Iraq, the energy has gone out of their liberal media critique. But, make no mistake, they are still very, very angry — at rank and file Americans like me.

The gripe on the right side is that “liberals” literally shouldn’t exist. We are Godless, death-loving traitors whose very existence is a blight on the American way of life. They don’t hate our leadership. They hate us personally.

This post by Thomas Crown at RedState sums it up nicely, I think:

I repeat: Should the entire American Left fall over dead tomorrow, I would rejoice, and order pizza to celebrate. They are not my countrymen; they are animals who happen to walk upright and make noises that approximate speech. They are below human. I look forward to seeing each and every one in Hell.

As the t-shirts say

The media sees only the Left these days because the Right has moved on to greener pastures.

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