Blogger bashing from deep left
A slice of blog-hater triumphalism gone awry:
If ever America needed a wake-up call about the mythology of blogging, we got it this month.
On Aug. 8, Connecticut businessman Ned Lamont defeated U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary, a triumph widely credited to the rah-rah racket produced by pro-Lamont armies stationed along the Internet.
Indeed, the bloggers had scored big. They had helped vault a local politician to national prominence and cemented the Iraq war as Issue No. 1 in the congressional elections. Not a bad day.
But their victory was short-lived. Even before the primary, Lieberman announced that, should he lose, he’d still run in November as an independent. This electoral chutzpah effectively rope-a-doped the bloggers and recharged the senator’s fabled Joe-mentum. Lieberman’s still the man to beat in the general election.
If this wasn’t enough to drain the effervescence from the blogger bubbly, America’s noisy Web wags were dealt an even more sobering blow 10 days later when Snakes on a Plane opened nationwide to a decidedly flat $15.3 million box office.
Before its premiere, Snakes had been the latest blogger darling, as swarms of online film geeks prematurely crowned it the summer’s big sleeper. This hyperventilating fan base even convinced Snakes‘ distributor, New Line Cinema, to up the movie’s rating to R, to ensure a gorier, more venomous snake fest.
Whaaa…? What the fargin’ frug is he talking about? The only blogger I’ve seen going on at all about Snakes has been Ace, and he’s mocking it mercilessly. I don’t know what blogs this guy is reading, but he’s about as off base as he could possibly be here. Anybody who takes piss-poor box office on the part of a movie everybody knew from the git-go would be utter crap as evidence that blogs ain’t all they’re cracked up to be is revealing his blog-envy a bit more than is probably good for him.
And scrolling on down to the end, I see that this guy writes for the Puffington Host.
Oh, I get it. He’s nuts, then. Cool. Never mind.
The whole thing reminds me of child-rearing. As the parent of any toddler can tell you, the younger the child, the louder the screams for attention — and quite often, the degree of the crisis is in reverse proportion to the decibels of the bellows.
To that end, it’s important to remember that the blogosphere is still in its infancy, and like any kid, it needs to be watched very carefully.
Once more: careful what you wish for there, Socrates — the same regulatory leash you seem to want bloggers on might someday as easily fit around the NYT’s or USA Today’s pencil necks. And for my money, if anyone “needs to be watched very carefully,” it’s the liberal MSM, which has been repeatedly shown to be dishonest, untrustworthy, and unwilling to properly acknowledge its own mistakes when caught. By bloggers, that is, which is undoubtedly at the root of this guy’s whole problem with them.
Ain’t it funny, though, how quickly these liberal-media guardians of free speech can jettison their most closely-held principles when it suits ‘em to. Why, one could almost be forgiven for not trusting in their integrity and good faith any more than one would trust John Dillinger with the keys to a bank vault.
- Entries
Especially in this case. Joe's pretty clueless, like most Democrats, but he's not a bad fellow when you get right down to it. He didn't deserve what the slapassnutroots gave him, and if he gets an opportunity to give them a righteous reaming later on, so much the better.
At the most basic level we both start off from the same place and want the same things, just disagreeing on how to achieve them. In the hard tussle of politics I can honor that. It's a duel. The nutroots start from from a dark plane where the United States is the fount of all evil, all ill - every stubbed toe is traced back to Karl Rove. There is no commonality with them, they are not honorable political opponents but existential enemies. They are to be treated as a Noam Chomsky, with utter contempt.
Not Joe Lieberman. He isn't that.
Given what they've become, we can't disenfranchise the American Left fast enough.
A little perspective: I think New Line knew Pacific 123 or whatever it was originally called more than likely would have done even worse had they left it alone, and so they acceded to the goofy changes not with visions of sweeping success but rather a fatalistic "why not - it can't suck any worse than it does" attitude.
Anyone who thinks this is egg on the face of bloggers is engaging in vicarious schadenfreude of a masturbatory nature and should not be taken seriously by other adults.