Bad mood blogging.
Time to fire a few rounds at my favourite targets.
First, this bit of profound meaninglessness from Joe Klein, asked by the WaPo what the Dems have to do to win back Congress:
Reread Rudyard Kipling's poem "If." Any other advice is extraneous.
Actually, coming from Klein, that's probably true.
Second, while I'm more forebearing than Brad Delong, they have really got to learn how to keep Martin Peretz off the TNR blog, where his most recent contribution is turning Leon Wieseltier's perfectly fine blast at Juan Cole into toxic sludge. What a fucking embarrassment for a progressive magazine.
And finally, there's Marshall Wittman, writing yesterday about YKos:
And a gaggle of supposedly centrist Presidential wannabees flocked to Vegas to genuflect before a blogger convention that had as much to do with winning mainstream America as Paris Hilton does with winning the hearts of Focus on the Family. Ironically, the once edgy bloggers have become yet another Democratic interest group - people with screen names - that is pandered to by politicians looking for "buzz" and money.
Does Wittman think before he types? To say the high-profile bloggers are an "interest group" is to define "interest group" down to nothing. There's nothing inately wrong with interest groups, but they're called "interest groups" because they have special demands that serve the interests of their group more or differently than those of the electorate at large. The teachers' union is an interest group because it pushes for policies designed to insure job security for teachers, even though opponents of such policies say they damage students. The teachers may be right but they clearly have a vested interest.
Except for net neutrality (on which they may be right but have, by definition, a vested interest), there's no comparable narrow set of interests that are being pushed by bloggers. The big liberal bloggers want the Democratic Party to win elections and implement basic liberal policies. Their tactical advice might be wrong, but it hardly constitutes a "special interest".
In the very same post, Wittman offers up this bit of profound meaninglessness:
There is the model of Clinton and there are the models of McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry. This is a time to choose.
McGovern. Kerry. Really, what's the difference?
First, this bit of profound meaninglessness from Joe Klein, asked by the WaPo what the Dems have to do to win back Congress:
Reread Rudyard Kipling's poem "If." Any other advice is extraneous.
Actually, coming from Klein, that's probably true.
Second, while I'm more forebearing than Brad Delong, they have really got to learn how to keep Martin Peretz off the TNR blog, where his most recent contribution is turning Leon Wieseltier's perfectly fine blast at Juan Cole into toxic sludge. What a fucking embarrassment for a progressive magazine.
And finally, there's Marshall Wittman, writing yesterday about YKos:
And a gaggle of supposedly centrist Presidential wannabees flocked to Vegas to genuflect before a blogger convention that had as much to do with winning mainstream America as Paris Hilton does with winning the hearts of Focus on the Family. Ironically, the once edgy bloggers have become yet another Democratic interest group - people with screen names - that is pandered to by politicians looking for "buzz" and money.
Does Wittman think before he types? To say the high-profile bloggers are an "interest group" is to define "interest group" down to nothing. There's nothing inately wrong with interest groups, but they're called "interest groups" because they have special demands that serve the interests of their group more or differently than those of the electorate at large. The teachers' union is an interest group because it pushes for policies designed to insure job security for teachers, even though opponents of such policies say they damage students. The teachers may be right but they clearly have a vested interest.
Except for net neutrality (on which they may be right but have, by definition, a vested interest), there's no comparable narrow set of interests that are being pushed by bloggers. The big liberal bloggers want the Democratic Party to win elections and implement basic liberal policies. Their tactical advice might be wrong, but it hardly constitutes a "special interest".
In the very same post, Wittman offers up this bit of profound meaninglessness:
There is the model of Clinton and there are the models of McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry. This is a time to choose.
McGovern. Kerry. Really, what's the difference?
1 Comments:
You're definitely right about Peretz. Seeing that post sent me into enough of a mini-fury (mostly bad flashbacks of other Peretz moments) that I deleted my bookmark to "The Plank." I feel guilty -- there are good posts on there -- but still, this exemplifies how TNR can be so frustrating.
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