Feuds should be based on good arguments.

OK, I swear no more writing about The New Republic for awhile. And I certainly understand Jason Zengerle's desire to continue TNR's feud with Kos and the rest of the partisan liberal blogs by taking a shot at the fact that, with Ciro Rodriguez' Texas-28 primary defeat last night, the blogs' prefered candidates are now 0 for 14 since the start of 2004. In fact, the failure of the blogs to get their preferred candidates past local and national party machines or sell them to offline voters, and how badly this failure jibes with certain blogospheric manifestos about the "netroots"' revolutionary clout, is well worth noting. I'd normally be inclined to sympathize with Zengerle's crow-back stance (Update, since Kevin just sent my traffic through the roof, let me clarify that I'd sympathize with Zengerle on the general grounds that it's a reasonable point to make in the ongoing TNR-vs.-liberal blogs feud, not because I think the the activist liberal blogs are fundamentally unimportant or won't be influential down the road. Actually, I think they will be.) That is if the arguments he chooses to make weren't completely wet:

When Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the proprietor of Daily Kos, recently told The Washington Monthly's Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "I'm not ideological at all. ... I'm just all about winning," he could have been speaking for the entire left-wing blogosphere. If there's one animating idea that's shared by liberal bloggers like Kos and Atrios and all the others, it's, as Wallace-Wells called it, "the ideology of winnerism."


Is it? Doesn't Zengerle posit there might be, like, a reason the blogs launched themselves behind Rodriguez that might have to do with ideology, in the sense that Cueller is (and he really is) a very bad Democrat? If Kos and Atrios just wanted a win for somebody with a D behind his name, they probably would have stayed out of Texas-28, which already gurantees such an outcome given that the GOP doesn't even run candidates in the district (somehow the Republican revolution never took hold there). The blogs took a chance on the underdog Rodriguez. Isn't that the opposite of a blind Democratic "winnerism"?

To the extent he talks about it at all, Zengerle chalks the blogs' preference for Rodriguez up the fact that Cueller hugged Bush after the SOTU. But, in fact, the liberal bloggers' complaints went far beyond, and are far more substantial than, that incident. In fact, most of the librerals' complaints with Cueller are ones Zengerle and his colleagues at TNR probably share. Or does TNR secretly like the Club for Growth? Obviously the majority of the masthead doesn't, but by so blatantly mischaracterizing Kos and other online Rodriguez-supporters, Zengerle is begging to be similarly mischaracterized himself. Not letting this minor point of likely agreement get in the way of a good feud enures that it continues to be the bad, tiring, dumbass feud it's been over the past couple of years.