Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Blog Fever

LA Times, today:

Blogging Sells, and Sells Out by Billmon.

By most accounts, blogs — web logs to the uninitiated — scored a major coup last week when CBS News admitted that it couldn’t vouch for the authenticity of memos supposedly written by George W. Bush’s commander in the Texas Air National Guard. The conservative bloggers who led the charge against the CBS story were hailed as giant slayers. And yet it’s the blogging phenomenon itself that may need the last rites.

That may seem a strange thing to say, given the flattering coverage of blogs triggered by the CBS affair. But the media’s infatuation has a distinct odor of the deathbed about it — not for the blogosphere, which has a commercially bright future, but for the idea of blogging as a grass-roots challenge to the increasingly sanitized “content” peddled by the Time Warner-Capital Cities-Disney-General Electric-Viacom-Tribune media oligopoly.

Matt Yglesias said more or less the same thing a month or so ago (I can’t be bothered to find the link) only his thinking was that blogs were rapidly devolving into an exclusive forum for professional writers in various specialized fields and the amateur players were fading away into obscurity.

Steve Gilliard, (via Atrios,) believes it’s commercial advertising that fuels the blogosphere already.

Meanwhile, The NY Times does a big story on liberal bloggers that apparently has the right blogosphere in a complete tizzy.

Blogging as we know it is dead. Long live blogging.

Update:

I should make it clear that I was in no way beDrudging any blogger’s success. I’m thrilled if anyone can make a buck doing this thing. If I got any real traffic on a regular basis, I’d think about doing it myself. And, believe me, on the days when I get one of those links from Atrios or some others, I think about it a lot because my traffic goes through the roof.

It’s all about linkage, folks.

The blogosphere is a beehive in which the queenbee bloggers (and I’m not just talking about Sullivan) serve and are served by the rest of the colony. As Atrios points out in the comments, as long as some of the top bloggers continue to link to other blogs, the blogosphere as we know it will continue to thrive. People need hubs and starting points to make their way through all the buzzing and that’s what the popular blogs provide.

Commercialization in terms of blogads doesn’t have much to do with it so far because the ads don’t seem to conflict with the content. That could change, I guess, but I think we are dealing more on a Nation model than Newsweek, anyway. Nobody’s going to buy an ad on Kos or Atrios who isn’t trying to reach liberals. They know exactly what they are getting into.

In my opinion, if there is any real danger of the old political blogosphere going extinct, I think it’s more in what Yglesias describes than strict commercialization. It may be moving toward “professionalization” which is truly a big change. Marshall, Drum, Sullivan, Kaus and The Corner may be the new developing paradigm.

It’s not that the blogosphere isn’t incredibly enhanced by the presence of those writers, it’s that they may develop the habit of only reading and linking to each other which, as Billmon points out, takes it one step closer to the insularity of the mainstream media. In academic fields this is generally a good thing — consult the experts, talk amongst yourselves, get feedback. But, in politics it’s not such a good idea. The blogosphere may not be the best sample of regular folks in the world, but it does consist of some intelligent, well informed citizens outside of the political and media world who are not required to please that establishment either socially or professionally and who bring a different perspective that may not make it into the Washington conference room on Monday morning or the cocktail party on Friday night.

In that sense, politics are more like art than science. The pros need fresh insights and passion or they get stale and repetitive. The blogosphere is a very convenient way to access some of that and it would be a shame if it contracted into a mirror image of the professional political media.. If it does,(with some relief I must admit) I’d probably just go back to reading newspapers and magazines and yelling at the TV, both of which I can do from the much more comfortable position of lying flat on my back.

As a political organizing and fund raising tool, the blogosphere has definitely shown its worth this round and it will remain a player, no doubt about it. Look at how much $$$$ just Atrios and Kos have managed to raise. If they were Republicans they’d be called “Conquerors.”

But other than that, I think the blogosphere will continue to change in largely unpredictable ways. Certainly, anything the mainstream media says about it (now that they’ve discovered it like it’s the Macarena of 2004) is almost assuredly wrong. So, I think it just keeps keepin on. Who knows what it all means and as long as it provides some good fun then there’s really no reason to question it.

And, as I have said many times, it beats putting your fist through a wall or kicking the cat. In fact, it’s downright therapeutic. Maybe that’s the real point after all.

Props To Joe Biden

Joe just turned Chris Wallace into a puddle on Fox, refusing to back down and challenging all the predictable assumptions. At the end, Wallace made a crack about Biden needing to go on decaf and Biden retorted, “the way you guys misrepresent thing, it’s just disgraceful.”

Correction: Evidently I heard Biden say “you guys misrepresent” meaning Fox, when he actually said “these guys misrepresent” meaning the Bush administration.

Not that there’s any real difference…

Say It Loud

I’m shrill and I’m proud.

Shivering In Our Boots

Andrea Mitchell just said that the Kerry campaign knows that if they take the fight to the president they have to be respectful because he is extremely well-liked and very popular. And Kerry talks in long sentences and is boring but there’s not much they can do about it.

Gosh, I think she’s being much too generous. John Kerry is not only long winded and boring, he is also known to hold forth on aboriginal history in town meetings and sing Andrew Lloyd Webber songs for hours on end on the stump. It will be a miracle if he manages to even stay in the race after debating our very sharp, entertaining president who I understand usually hands out hundred dollar bills and tells hilarious jokes while laying out a cogent, simple plan for all Americans to become millionaires by 2008. I sure hope he doesn’t do that in the debates or old boring Kerry will definitely lose.

Epic Disaster

Charles Peters at the Washington Monthly asks, “Was I right?”

Boy, he most certainly was:

Just before we went to war in Iraq, I wrote in this space, “This country has been conned by Karl Rove and the super-hawks. They have succeeded in changing the subject from Bush’s failures and embarrassments, putting Iraq first on the national agenda for nearly six months at the expense of more important matters–like finding Osama bin Laden, securing peace between Israel and Palestine, drastically improving the FBI and CIA’s ability to deal with terrorism, keeping nuclear weapons from being used by nations that already have them, including North Korea, and engineering economic recovery here at home. If we end up paying practically all the bill for Iraq and subsequent military occupation, that money won’t be there for badly needed health and education programs … Once you consider these other higher priorities, the danger from Iraq isn’t nearly imminent enough to justify war.” I haven’t changed my mind.

I think that one of the most frustrating things about Bush’s smarmy rejoinder “they world is better off without Saddam in power” is that you have to answer…”well, yes, BUT THERE ARE PRIORITIES, GODDAMIT…”

It is impolitic to say it, (and probably suicidal) but in a very real sense, the answer to the question “is the world better off without Saddam in power?” is no.

9/11 did change everything. It meant that we could not afford to go around willy nilly experimenting with Wilsonian democracy schemes in the mid-east without further endangering Americans by ramping up terrorist recruiting. It meant we needed to be smart and cunning, not blustering loudly with half baked information or “liberating people” without considering the consequences. It meant that creating another failed state crawling with lawless terrorists was the most dangerous thing we could do. But, that is exactly what we did.

Clearly, if we had left Saddam in power and used the excuse of 9/11 to get inspectors back in, we would probably have made more progress against the fight against the Islamic radicals who pose the greatest threat to us. At the very least we wouldn’t have been creating more terrorists every single day with our corrupt mismanagement of the occupation.

Saddam was not an imminent or even near term threat. We knew it then and we certainly know it now. If one had asked the American people in the fall of 2002 if they thought it was worth it to “liberate” Iraq if it made Americans less safe, I think we know what the answer would be. We are a good people but we aren’t that good. Sadly, it appears that we will have to have that fact demonstrated before many people will understand that this is precisely what we just did.

And those poor schmucks who are over there fighting and dying for this misbegotten war need to believe that they are doing a good deed for their fellow man and protecting their own. I understand that. But, their commander in chief has made a series of terrible, terrible errors and he is setting them up for death right now by manipulating the situation on the ground in order to get elected here at home. It just gets worse and worse.

Two-faced Bush can pretend and lie and prevaricate and mislead all he wants. But, the facts are what they are. He sent American soldiers to die for no good reason. It has resulted in a large number of unnecessary Iraqi deaths in the process and it is creating Anti-American terrorists much faster than they can even kill themselves.

It’s a disaster of epic proportions.

Freedom’s Just Another Word For Chaos

Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they’re fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of us all. George W. Bush, UN General Assembly, September 21, 2004

Well, except for the victims of the bombings, kidnappings and beheadings:

Gunmen have seized six Egyptians in a raid on their Baghdad office, Iraqi officials say, the third in a series of kidnappings of foreigners in the Iraqi capital this month.

[…]

Rahman said the Egyptians work for Iraqna, a subsidiary of Orascom which is an Egyptian-owned mobile telecommunications company.

Last week, two Americans and a Briton were kidnapped at their home in Baghdad by armed men.

A group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi later beheaded the Americans, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, and posted video footage of the killings on the Internet.

But, don’t worry about it. We’ll stop hearing about all this unpleasantness soon. It’s only a matter of time before it’s too dangerous for any journalists to report on what’s going on:

Germany’s biggest television network, ARD, said on Friday it planned to pull out its two correspondents in Iraq after a foreign ministry warning that German journalists could be singled out for kidnappings.

Separately, the Spanish government has recommended to media that they withdraw their correspondents from Iraq following the increase in attacks and kidnappings there, the newspaper El Mundo said on its Web site on Friday.

The Spanish news agency EFE has withdrawn its only Spanish correspondent, Jose Manuel Seage, from Baghdad, a senior journalist at the agency said.

More than 100 foreigners have been abducted in Iraq since April in a deepening campaign, among them two French journalists who are still being held. Most hostages have been released, but around 30 have been killed.

The German foreign ministry last week strengthened a warning originally issued in March 2003 that mentioned journalists and the “very high risk” of kidnapping. But it declined to comment specifically on the issue on Friday.

[…]

Until this month, almost all the kidnapped foreigners were snatched on Iraq’s perilous roads. But the capture of foreigners in Baghdad in operations that seem carefully planned is an escalation that has alarmed foreign embassies and firms.

Everything is going very well. If it weren’t for that little problem with fifty percent unemployment, civil war, beheadings and suicide bombers, it would be a lot like Nebraska.

Flying Blind

What happens when a horserace is being called by different commentators in completely different ways? This post in Salon’s War Room again shows that something has gone seriously wrong with the polling this election:

It’s been said that the 2004 election would be a challenge for pollsters, and today’s polls are a fine demonstration. Put simply, side by side they make little to no sense.

In the national arena, the Associated Press finds Bush up by nine points, 52-41. An Economist poll, conducted on the same days, finds Kerry leading by one point. Both surveys were of registered voters, so previous disputes between pollsters regarding who constitutes a likely voter, can’t account for the discrepancy.

Some new state polls also lead nowhere, with Wisconsin going from a two-point Kerry lead to a 14-point Bush romp in 24 hours, and Oregon, which went from a 12-point Kerry rout to a one-point Bush lead in the same span. And two Florida polls released today are at odds. Gallup gives Bush a 47-45 lead among registered voters, while Quinnipiac University finds Bush ahead 49-41.

I wonder if the campaigns can trust their own polls any more than these? How scary. Politics without a net.

I’m beginning to truly believe that this race is the one we’ve all been waiting for for the last few cycles — the election when so many people screen their calls and so many people use cell phones that you can no longer get an accurate sample.

One experiment worth watching is the Zogby online poll. He seems to have faith that he’s got a good model. We’ll see.

If we don’t see a better consensus before November 2nd, it’s going to be one nail-biter of a night.

Killing Time

Following up on my earlier post about the Bush campaign claiming that Kerry is causing the insurgency, I find this article by Matt Yglesias that points out that two-faced Junior Codpiece is actually doing it. it is one of the most egregious cases of projection we’ve yet seen.

Bush has adopted policies designed to keep the death count low, primarily by avoiding ground combat in the Sunni triangle. Good campaign tactics, needless to say, but, as ever, the Bush team seems better at winning elections than winning wars. By delaying any assault on the wily Salafi terrorists (read: Democratic campaign operatives) lurking in Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi, and Baquba until after November, we give them more time to dig in, prepare defenses, and strengthen their forces before the attack.

An important point comes next, so it gets a paragraph of its own: This plan will get people killed. If an assault is to be mounted, it should be done as soon as possible, before the adversary has been given months to prepare for it. The Marines and soldiers serving in Iraq volunteered for the military, but they’ve been conscripted into the Bush campaign. Decisions, as Lieutenant General James Conway recently stated, are being made on the basis of narrow political considerations rather than military ones. It’s appropriate for generals to be subordinate to civilian politicians, but not to civilian campaign strategists. We’re waging war as an extension of an electoral campaign, exposing our soldiers to harassing attacks right now and to a more difficult fight later on in order to help secure the president’s re-election.

George W. Bush is setting up our soldiers for a killing field in order to keep the casualty count down during the election campaign. There’s a word for that and starts with a “t” and ends with a “reason.”

Security Spin

As I watched Judy Woodruff go on and on yesterday about the alleged Security Moms and how they are abandoning the Democrats in favor of that handsome hunk of manhood, Crusader Codpiece, I was reminded of the interesting piece that Matt Stoller wrote during the RNC on the subject.

This “security mom” story is a campaign tactic to keep Republican women in the fold. The bogus polls gave them cover to make their appeal based upon a two-faced premise that they were already busting the gender gap open. Attractive housewives have been popping up all over television to discuss “their issues” and make the case for Junior as their security teddy bear.

Here’s what Matt reported from a GOP training seminar for women at the GOP convention:

“The Bush campaign is not anywhere in the hemisphere of where these women are…” Leslie Sanchez, political analyst for Bush/Cheney

I spent three and a half hours in a training session for grassroots leaders of the GOP, hosted by GOPAC, Newt Gingrich’s group that led the Republican Congressional takeover in 1994. …the most interesting part of the day was a presentation by Leslie Sanchez, Bush/Cheney advisor and frequent commentator on MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN, on how to win women voters. According to Sanchez, women voters make up the majority of registered voters in every battleground state, and they are angst-ridden, scared, tolerant, cynical, distrusting, and want and fear change. They are also the key to this election.

In 2000, there was an eleven point gender gap in terms of Republican support for women. Women are more often registered to vote, they are usually registered independent, and Republican women – who tend to be married – are voting increasingly for Democrats. The model is that they first vote for a Democratic female, and then start voting for Democratic candidates in general. This trend is worrisome to Republicans. The target for the Bush campaign this year is married women with high religiosity, women who voted for Bush in 2000 and value their family’s safety.

[…]

The bottom line here is that the President’s messaging strategy so far has been a failure with women, and women will decide this election. This Convention is an attempt to fix this political problem, but the only real solution is to scare women into voting for him, because Bush has no real successes that he can credibly point to (and that women believe).

In other words, the “security mom” is actually a Republican who Rove is fearful of losing, not a Democrat who is drifting to the Republicans. As usual, the media got seriously spun.

Noam Scheiber does some fact checking in an interesting article in TNR today:

Indeed, just about the only evidence you can find in support of the security mom proposition comes from the New York Times/CBS poll. A Times/CBS poll conducted September 12-16 found that Bush gained 14 points relative to Kerry among women since mid-August, but a mere four points relative to men (itself a highly dubious proposition), which would have narrowed the gender gap substantially. When I asked CBS polling director Kathy Frankovic about this, her response was sheepish. “I attribute it to short-term/long-term” differences, she said. In any case, Frankovic was quick to add, CBS had just finished another poll, which showed a return of the “gender gap one would expect.”

Ruy Texeira runs the numbers.

Shameless

Joie Chen on CNN just interviewed Brigadier General David Grange who basically said that John Kerry is causing the insurgency in Iraq because he is criticizing the president and “emboldening” the bad guys. (Poodles Chen and Grange hit all the GOP catch phrases right on cue.) It looks as if their plan is to say that the increased violence is John Kerry’s responsibility in the hopes that Kerry will ratchet down his effective attack.(See Cheney’s remarks of yesterday which he is repeating on the trail today.)

This is just the latest chapter in the classic post 9/11 playbook in which they virtually shut down dissent and paralyzed the country with accusations of 5th columns and treason for speaking out against two-faced Junior Bush. More and more it looks to me as if Rove is simply running a 2002 replay, which depended on keeping the dems off balance on national security and ginning up turnout.

It does not appear that Kerry is going to fall for this line of balderdash and I hope that the red staters in tight contests can resist the urge to fall in line. I think giving in on this is much worse for the Democrat psychologically than aggressively responding. At this point, when Junior forces a member of the opposition to bow to his will it makes them look much weaker than if they are bloodied in the fight.

I’ve noticed that the wingnuts always vociferously deny impugning the patriotism of their rivals even though they constantly do it. So, I’m hoping the Dems run straight at their accusers with this latest nonsense. I suspect this patented fratboy “don’t blame me” strategy is not ringing true with the swing voters. It’s just kool-aid for the faithful in a turn-out street fight.

We Dems have been enjoying a little sip of a nice Cabernet (we don’t drink children’s drinks) ourselves these past few days and it tastes quite good. Give ’em hell John-John.