Ackerman Wants Bush Dead, Not to Mention a New Counterinsurgency Plan

I've received an e-mail notification from the Center for Independent Media directing me to Spencer Ackerman's new piece at the Washington Independent, "Recasting the War on Terrorism: A Progressive Coalition Wants Obama to Be More Than the Anti-Bush."

First thoughts?

Well, no shit Sherlock, if you'll pardon the expression. I don't normally resort to urban slang, but since Ackerman's a wannabe punk hipster with a supremely disgusting repertoire of profanity, so I'm sure readers will understand.

For the substantive record, Ackerman should be known by his words, for example this passage from July:

The Iraq war is and has always been an obscenity, a filthy lie born of avarice and lust for power masquerading as virtue. This is what imperialism looks like. But the age of empire is over. The same hubris that led Bush into the Iraq disaster led him to miscalculate, again and again, over how to entrench it. But now he is impotent, unable to impose his will, and the nakedness of his attempted imposition has led the American and the Iraqi peoples to wake up and end his nightmare. May his war-crimes prosecutor be Iraqi; may his judge be American; and may he die in the Hague.

I wrote of Ackerman's post at the time:

This is the highest stage of moral relativist anti-Americanism, topped-off with a flourish of abject secular demonology.

And given our potty-mouthed Flophouse freak's piece today, delivered to me via my blog profile contact-information (the editors really need to check my archives before sending stuff out to American Power), I have no reason to suspect Ackerman's abandoned his nihilism. He writes, for example:

Buoyed by high expectations for the first year of Barack Obama’s administration, an informal coalition of progressive national-security and civil-liberties experts are urging the president-elect to redefine the war on terrorism.

Eight years of the Bush administration’s approach to counterterrorism have yielded two open-ended and bloody wars; a massively expanded security apparatus, and spending on defense far outpacing outlays on domestic programs, even during a crisis-plagued economy.

Yet while liberals have spent much of this time opposing the Bush administration’s agenda, many of their proposals for Obama go beyond merely rolling back President George W. Bush’s policies — withdrawing from Iraq, shuttering the Guantanamo Bay detention complex, abolishing torture — to offer new areas of emphasis, like stabilizing Afghanistan, an Arab-Israeli peace and a re-envisioned balance between security and liberty.

Through white papers delivered to the Obama transition team, new reports and interviews with reporters, this loose affiliation of progressives is saying it has a real opportunity to recast the U.S. effort against terrorism in fundamental ways.

Consistent with the broader progressive agenda of achieving global security through multilateral cooperation, economic development and respect for human rights, the past few days have seen a series of proposals urging rejection of the Bush administration’s militarism. To the degree these various progressive groups have a concerted goal, it’s to influence the transition with specific liberal ideas for new directions in the war on terrorism.

You can see why one might hardly be dumbstruck in reading this, given the quadrillions of bytes of BDS spewed over the last eight years of the current adminstration.

But more than that, MSM reporting is even highlighting the building leftist backlash to Obama's centrism. For example, today's Los Angeles Times reports that the antiwar left is worried that Obama's selling out the antiwar surrender enthusiasts to the "people who supported the war from the beginning," a reference to folks like Senator Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

The left wants nothing less than the utter emasculation of American power, with increasing "multilateralism" the buzzword for legitimizing the extreme globalist internationalism of the contemporary left. The flaky imprimatur of the "Washington Independent" does nothing to sanitize the disastrously relativist agenda of Ackerman's "loose affiliation of progressives."

The truth is we're losing in Afghanistan right now because of the weak-kneed nature of the current multinational force. As Michael Yon wrote last week, de facto victory is at hand in Iraq, notwithstanding the likelihood of the odd deadenders mounting spasms of nihilist mayhem on the Iraqi people. But Afghanistan needs an infusion of resolve, not a progressive coalition of the sniveling:

A new president will soon begin to make critical decisions about Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crisis at home, and countless other matters. While the Iraq war began, then boiled, and finally cooled before President-elect Obama will be sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the Afghanistan-Pakistan spectacle is just getting started. He was always a fierce opponent of our involvement in Iraq. And, as with so many Democrats in the Senate, he argued frequently, during the campaign, that we should have been focused on Afghanistan all along, because it is the real incubator of the international terrorist threat. Timing being everything, our new president will get his wish. Afghanistan now moves to center stage. The conflicts in Afghanistan and between Afghanistan and Pakistan have the simmering potential to overshadow anything we’ve seen in Iraq. Here are a few things I hope he understands:

Our enemies are winning. The enemies know it. We know it. Who are they? The Taliban, with its deep local roots, is enemy number one. Al-Qaeda is hanging around to make trouble. Some Paks, who don’t want to see a thriving Pushtun state on their border, are our enemies. They fund and shelter the Taliban even though we rely on them to help us defeat it. Nothing is straightforward in this part of the world. We have other enemies in Afghanistan who hate the Taliban.

Most of our allies are not very helpful. With the exception of the British, Canadians, Dutch, and a few others such as the Aussies, we are not fighting this with an “A-team” of international allies. With a few exceptions, our allies on the ground are comprised of several dozen countries that mostly refuse to fight. The bulk of NATO amounts to little more than a “Taliban piñata.” The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is proving nearly worthless and provides no credible threat to armed opposition groups (AOGs) in Afghanistan. Most of the NATO member countries seem to break out in a cold sweat at the mere mention of “Taliban.” They piled in when the war looked easy and largely humanitarian. But now that it’s getting harder and more dangerous, they would like to pile out.

To ensure that we have influence over the outcome, we need more soldiers in Afghanistan, and fast. They need to be U.S. forces, British, Canadian, and Aussie; we cannot depend on NATO in general and they don’t know how to fight anyway. Unless President-elect Obama knows some kind of magic spell, he will not be able to persuade most NATO countries to do the right thing. Springtime 2009 will likely bring very heavy fighting in Afghanistan. We will not have credible negotiating positions while we remain outgunned by a bunch of old rifles and dinged-up RPGs.

Yon pinpoints the resources needed to finish the job: more firepower and the will to use it - something not likely to be realized with the progressives' mushy calls to "legitimize" a beefed up deployment through the utopian defense bureaucracies of "NATO countries."

The leftists will continue to wet their shorts as long as the coming Obama administration makes concessions to the realities of military power.

The fact that the same people who pushed for an American defeat in Iraq are now hoping to "multilateralize" the deployment in Afghanistan shows that Obama is indeed moving right, and this in turn is one of the most reassuring signs that Obama's earlier campaign pledges were largely junk fodder for the masses, and that perhaps he's actually shortened the daylight between his ill-considered antiwar nonsense and the precepts of actual foreign policy responsibility.

That same responsibility, of course, is something of which Spencer Ackerman knows nothing.

Leftist Depravity Continues with Accusations of Palin Pedophilia

Randi Rhodes has claimed that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is "friends with all the teenage boys" in town, and parents can't let their kids "sleep over" at the Palin home:

Brian Maloney offers some background:

Just how far are lefty pundits willing to go to smear Sarah Palin? On behalf of the "progressive" movement, libtalker Randi Rhodes seems determined to sink to new depths of moral depravity, with the limits of imagination as her only impediment.

Less than a week after her wildly dishonest claim that John McCain was "well-treated" during his wartime imprisonment in Vietnam, Rhodes is at it again, this time making a strong inference that Palin likes to sleep with teenage boys.

It's further evidence of a widespread smear campaign that involves lefty bloggers, libtalkers and the mainstream news media. With this gang, the ends apparently justify the means. That there isn't a shred of evidence to back up any of their claims is irrelevant: this is full-scale character assassination.

I'm having an ongoing debate with Dan Nexon at Duck of Minerva over the relative extremes on the right and the left of the spectrum. Dan argues, essentially, that the continuous examples of left-wing depravity are isolated instances and cannot be generalized to "the left."

But as regular readers know well, I've chronicled example after example of the left's intolerance and evil found throughout the netroots, including top members of the leftosphere who coordinate closely with the Democratic Party and the Barack Obama campaign.

Yesterday, for example, Daily Kos had this image posted in a now-deleted comment thread:

You can still read, however, the Kos-hosted diary, "Eulogy Before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel":

As Israel reach the milestone of the 60th anniversary commemoration, its legacy will be showered not with peace and goodwill but revulsion of conscience and damnation.

I could continue around the horn of the leftosphere all afternoon finding examples of Palin derangement, left-wing nti-Semitism, Bush-Cheney demonization, and so forth. But there's no need. I've written about the issue many times, for example, in my essay, "Surrendering Reason to Hate?":

This quest for enemies consumes far left-wing partisans. It is an endless search seeking to delegitimize and dehumanize those who would threaten the safety of a secular, redistributionist world of exclusive false brotherhood and psychological security.

This is why I think there are variations in the propensity to surrender to hate. The left's psychopolitical agenda is "clothed in darkness." It is this very difficult for them to find that "one good thing" about those with whom they differ.

I wrote that over a month ago, but just this week Camille Paglia made a similar point in discussing the Democratic-left's response to the Palin phenomenon:

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.

None of this is statistical confirmation for a generalized hypothesis on the hard-left's secular demonology. But it's demonstrably clear that folks from top bloggers like Markos Moulitsas and Andrew Sullivan to the nihilists at Sadly No! to TBogg's demonic conservative ridicule-machine are on an endless quest to destroy their enemies with a venomous brew of hate and intolerance.

Barack Obama's collapse from the heights of "Oneness" has only added to this zealotry.

*********

UPDATE: TBogg's here to correct me:

Randi Rhodes left Air America back in April after being suspended by the network. So you just set a new land speed record by being wrong four words into your post.

Yet, TBogg's got no problem with Rhodes' Palin derangement, and of course, no word on the demonic conservative ridicule machine.

Sarah Palin and the Frontier of American Feminism

This afternoon I confessed, "The main reason I'm so excited about Sarah Palin is in the way she's positively energized the Republican base."

While true, I should add that I'm absolutley blown away, frankly, at the radical feminist response to Palin's nomination as the GOP vice-presidential running mate.

If you haven't yet, be sure to read Michelle Cottle's case study in the depressing feminist lament, "A Bad Year For Feminism: Can Someone Please Tell Me What Happened?"

I think women of the contemporary left are feeling simply violated that a conservative mother from a non-contiguous outback state could credibly claim the mantle as America's top female politician. It has to be a shock, which explains the vehemence that accompanies attacks on any and all facets of Palin's version of the feminine mystique.

But don't take my word for it. Check out Camille Paglia's perspective, which endorses Barack Obama, but celebrates the audacity of Sarah Palin's gendered power (via Allahpundit):

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

Kay Hymowitz, who we might expect to be more favorable to a GOP-style feminism, in any case, confirms Palin's feminine muscularity:

Whatever Palin’s political impact, her cultural significance is profound. For better and for worse, she introduces a new and likely long-running cultural type to the national stage—the red-state feminist.

Of course, the feminist commentariat, primarily coastal and upper-middle-class, has been quick to deny that Palin is any sort of feminist at all. Yes, Palin can boast political success, activism, authority, and self-confidence in front of an audience of 37 million, and, though less widely discussed (perhaps because so profoundly envied), an egalitarian marriage of the sort that has become the foundational principle of feminist utopia. But in most other respects, especially her position on abortion, she has struck female media types as something more like the Anti-Feminist. She is a “humiliation for America’s women” (Judith Warner for the New York Times) and a tool of the “patriarchs” (Gloria Steinem for the Los Angeles Times).

But the crucial point here is that Palin never wanted to be part of Steinem’s club, and in that respect she speaks for many of her sex. The large majority of women—surveys have put the number at somewhere around 75 percent—shy away from calling themselves feminists, even while supporting some movement goals like equal pay. The primary reason for their coyness: feminism’s ambivalence at best, and hostility at worst, toward motherhood and marriage. The refuseniks may or may not remember that Betty Friedan described full-time motherhood as a “waste of human self” and home as a “comfortable concentration camp.” They may or may not be able to quote Steinem on fish and bicycles. But on some level they understand that the framework of establishment feminism has motherhood, and often marriage, as the menacing 300-pound security guard whom men have hired to stand in the way of women’s achievement.

Palin represents a red-state version of feminism that completely deconstructs this framework. Sure, part of the red staters’ identification with Palin is a matter of lifestyle. Blue-state feminists live in big cities and suburbs; Palin lives in South Podunk. Blue staters’ kids play soccer; Palin’s play hockey. They have WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER bumper stickers; she’s a member of the NRA. They dine on sushi; she eats salmon that she caught and gutted. If you’re an Iowa toll collector married to a refrigerator repairman, Palin may well be your gal by reason of her origin and leisure activities alone.

But let's conclude this review with Paglia once again, who nails the secular demonology theme regularly showcased here:

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.

You go, girl!

Catholic League Takes Issue With Offensive Lefty Blogs

I've spent a good amount of time laying out a theory of the secular demonology common among lefty bloggers. Part of this project has been to offer comparisons of crude profanity widely available across the leftosphere.

Thus, I'm not surprised that the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has identifed as "offensive" a number of left-wing blogs that have been credentialed by the Democratic National Committee:

Over 120 blogs have been credentialed as members of the media for the Democratic National Convention; those who have received credentials are allowed to cover the Convention at the Pepsi Center. While most of them offer legitimate commentary, some do not.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue is protesting two of the blogs:

“The list of credentialed blogs include radical sites like The Daily Kos. Worse are blogs that feature anti-Catholic and obscene material. The two most offensive are Bitch Ph.D. and Towleroad.

“On the home page of Bitch Ph.D. there is a picture of two children: one of them is shown flashing his middle finger. Today’s lead post, which was written August 17, is called ‘Jesus Christ.’ It begins with, ‘I’m a really crappy Catholic who hasn’t been to mass in ages because most parishes around here ‘will’ insist on being aggressively anti-abortion….’ The writer then objects to some children’s toys on the grounds that they are more offensive than desecrating the Eucharist. The toys are actually balloons that have been made to depict Jesus in various poses, including a crucified Christ; one of these images shows Jesus with a penis. Several who commented on this image made patently obscene comments.

“Towleroad describes itself as ‘A Site with Homosexual Tendencies.’ Accordingly, it shows men in jock straps and underwear. It also has a post on Pope Benedict XVI that takes him to task for wearing a cape with ermine. Some of those who commented on this described the pope in a vile and profane way.

“Both of these blogs should be cut immediately from the list of credentialed sites. Neither functions as a responsible media outlet and both offend Catholics, as well as others. To allow them access to the Democratic National Convention sends a message to Catholics they will not forget. We look for Leah Daughtry, CEO of the Convention, to nix them ASAP.”

I can't dismiss the sense of schadenfreude at Bitch Ph.D.'s selection, as I've been singled out by that outfit for my "racism" in denouncing the black cult of victimology.

I've never heard of "Toweleroad," although by the looks of it I can understand the Catholic League's objection.

What's interesting is the affirmation of the Catholic League's concerns, as evidenced by a look at some of the lefty responses attacking the organization's president, Bill Donohue:

How dare there be gays on the internet! Amazingly, Donahue lists the jock strap photos before citing an allegedly offensive post about the Pope. No one who isn't a closeted homosexual would be so distressed about unapologetic displays of homosexuality. You should just come out of the closet, Bill. We'll accept you for who you are.

The Carpetbagger Report asks:

Did the Catholic League go through all 120 blogs, looking for something that would offend them so they could do this press release? By the looks of it, I’m pretty sure they did.

I'd bet they didn't have to view more than a quarter of these before finding some objectionable material.

Still, the issue for me is not that they should be banned, but how well they represent Democratic Party base? I'm pretty sure they do.

Searching for Hate in the Blogosphere

Even before Arkansas Democratic Chairman Bill Gwatney succumbed to his gunshot wounds on Wednesday, the left-wing blogosphere lit-up with allegations that a right-wing extremist had shot another liberal.

For example, leftist bloggers were quick to allege, without the release of any details on the assailant's background or motive, that conservative "wingnuts" like Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin encouraged a "climate of hate" that provoked the extermination of liberals (recall just two weeks ago a gunman killed two at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, in Knoxville, Tennessee).

In an essay this week, Jonathan Bellman of the University of Northern Colorado, argued that the right has essentially declared open-season on the word "liberal" and anyone associated with it:

It has become what “Jew” was in Nazi Germany and “Communist” was during the Red Scare: something so threatening that it needn’t be explained or questioned. Right-wing high priests like Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have for a long time implied that “liberal” equals something like “seditious terrorist.” It is so ingrained now that we barely notice, or quietly agree.

As I've noted before, the left's propensity to see evil designs on liberals reflects their own ideological foundations in hatred, a secular demonology protective of the perceived purity of the liberal sensibilities.

It's thus interesting to note the dust-up online today over the discovery of death threats against "liberal traitors" on some conservative websites:

On Wednesday night, Fox "News'" Bill O'Reilly continued his dishonest and deceptive attacks on websites, such as Huffington Post and Daily Kos, which he misleadingly describes as "hate sites" featuring "vicious far-left attacks" as based on selective reader comments he's discovered posted on those sites.

In the latest of his continuing segments with "Internet Cop" Amanda Carpenter, of the rightwing website Townhall.com, O'Reilly pointed to a number of objectionable comments at the two sites, from "far-left kooks," before tepidly lauding both HuffPo and Daily Kos for having removed some of them, presumably after they were brought to the attention of site moderators.

"Where is that rocket propelled grenade launcher when you need one," O'Reilly displayed on a chyron, and then "Let's hope the dissidents aim is good!" Both of the quotes are purported to be from a "Blog Posting" at HuffPo, according to the Fox "News" graphic, posted in regard to a group of Iraq War Veterans who support the war effort....

But O'Reilly and Carpenter clearly have been protesting a bit too much, as it turns out Carpenter's own website is guilty of the same --- and even far worse --- "vicious" attacks, and potentially even illegal ones, including death threats issued against Barack Obama and "traitorous liberals."

Despite the mock outrage of the Fox rightwingers, The BRAD BLOG has been pointed, by a reader, to a number of out-and-out (and repeated) death threats issued by "bloggers" at Carpenter's own Townhall site.

The multiple threatening comments are posted on the Townhall blog of rightwing radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt, and include death threats against the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, Barack Obama. They were posted on July 10th of this year at Townhall and, as of this posting on August 14th, still remain on the popular rightwing website which requires registration before commenters are allowed to post...

Picking up on this, Dave Neiwart, the leftosphere's premiere crusader against "pseudo-fascism," has denounced conservative hatred:

Two days ago, a gunman walked into the offices of the Democratic Party in Little Rock, Arkansas, and shot the state's chairman to death. The motives are still unclear, but it is starting increasingly to look like yet another case in which an unhinged wingnut decided to "take out" more liberals.

Two weeks ago, another gunman walked into a liberal Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and began shooting, killing one man and wounding several others before he was tackled. He had written a manifesto before the rampage indicating his belief that "all liberals should be killed." At his home, investigators found books attacking liberals by the likes of Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and ... Bill O'Reilly.

These issues have, of course, never been discussed on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News program. O'Reilly has never even mentioned the fact that the Knoxville shooter read his books and evidently watched his show. Indeed, his show not only constantly demonizes liberals, O'Reilly frequently does so by accusing liberals of being the source of vicious hatemongering -- as he did Wednesday, in the segment above, in which he informs us that "the real haters in America are on the far left" -- even though the majority of the quotes they cite are from anonymous commenters and diarists, and in every case the host site has removed them.

But as BradBlog noticed, one need only go to the Townhall.com site that hosts of Amanda Carpenter, his guest in this segment, to find prime examples of right-wing hate directed at liberals -- and no apparent attempt made to remove them. A sample, from Hugh Hewitt's blog:

A day of reckoning approaches... (Why is it liberal traitors like Brob feel they have to resort to profanity to make points? Because they equate emotionalism with reality - "If I scream loud enough and make enough of a scene, I'll get my way". Ten-year-old potty-mouthed brats, all of them.)

And I said traitors intentionally. I know more than one military man and woman stationed overseas who cannot wait to rotate back once the job over there is done and complete the work of fighting all enemies foreign AND domestic, Posse Comitatus be damned, and hunt down the Copperheads in our midst.

Traitors, be afraid. Be very afraid.

There's plenty more, of course, where this came from. And you can always find similar sentiments at O'Reilly's site, where again no effort is ever made to remove such commentary.

But, I suppose, we "Nazis" on the left are responsible for this. Probably because we just always inspire these sentiments, so therefore it's our fault.

Let me be the first to put out the call, once again, for a complete cessation to the competitive demonization we see across the blogosphere. I'm not as naïve to think that we won't have mutual allegations of hatred, and certainly folks on both sides of the political spectrum engage in incitement to violence in the comment threads at untold numbers of blogs, but these attacks shouldn't be a part of our political dialogue.

I'll note, though, that Neiwart confuses those alleged as "Nazis" by some commentators with contemporary Marxist demonologists who have shunned divine grace to launch steady attacks against dead conservatives, most recently Jesse Helms and Tony Snow.

Moreover, whereas some right-wing blogs are polluted by the odd instances of extremism, like that cited at Townhall, it is not the explicit policy of conservatives to welcome hated-filled comments as original "content" at the website, as is the case with leftist blogs such as Daily Kos (see here and here).

Perhaps the left's permissive attitudes toward aggressive hatred on their blogs relates to the much higher propensity for leftist bloggers to pepper their attacks on "wingnuts" with vile obscenities (a recent Google content analysis found liberal bloggers to be more that 12 times as likely to use profanity in blogging than conservatives).

So, while we should all condemn attempts to inflict evil on the other, it's simply hypocritical and inaccurate for members of the left to mount unsubstantiated attacks on alleged conservative hate-filled killers while at the same time encouraging artistic license of such content demonology in the leftosphere.

Obscenities and the Left-Wing Blogosphere

A couple of weeks back I wrote a post examining the tendency toward profanity among leftist bloggers: "Obscenities in the Blogosphere."

I argued that crude vulgarity has become essentially the lingua franca of the hard-left blogosphere and commentocracy. Widespread profanity appears to provide leftists with some assumed heightened firepower with which to beat down opponents, who are demonized as fascist imperialists intent to exterminate racial minorities and the poor, among other things.

My observations derived from recent experience, as well as the debate surrounding profanty at last month's Netroots Nation conference in Texas.

Well it turns out that Matthew Sheffield at the Washington Times has performed a Google content analysis to determine the relative propensity to profanity between top left and right blog communities: "Profanity Greater on Liberal Blogs":

Are liberals more profane than conservatives? Online, the answer seems to be yes. Profanity, those taboo words banned from the broadcast airwaves, is a feature of many people's daily lives. It's much less so in the establishment media world. TV and radio broadcasts are legally prohibited from using it, most newspapers (including this one) have traditionally refrained from its usage.

That's not the case with the Web, where bloggers and readers face no such restrictions. That likely comes as no surprise; what may be surprising, however, is to what degree profanity seems to be a feature more common on one side of the political blogosphere than the other....

The top 10 liberal sites (Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Democratic Underground, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, Think Progress, Atrios, Greenwald, MyDD and Firedoglake) have a profanity quotient of 14.6.

The top 10 conservative sites (Free Republic, Hot Air, Little Green Footballs, Townhall, NewsBusters, Lucianne, Wizbang, Ace of Spades, Red State and Volokh Conspiracy) have a quotient of 1.17.

What explains this disparity?

Sheffield hypothesizes that Bush derangement is a precipitating factor. But beyond that, religious belief among conservatives inclines them less toward the use of profanity in their daily lives, and thus in blogging:

Conservatives, especially those who are more religious, are less likely to use profanity in their daily conversation.

This ties in pretty much with the my thesis on the left's secular demonology:

How might we explain all of this? Well, in my view, these folks are essentially Marxist, and at base, we might consider Marxist thought a doctrine of hatred, a secular demonology:

We hate those, whose existence urges us to reconsider our theories and our vocabularies. We hate what places a safe and irresponsible categorization of the world in jeopardy. We hate what threatens the purity and predictability of our perception of the world, our mode of discourse, and in effect, our mental security.

Thus, for the left, rather than consider that vulgarity has no proper place in the respectable exchange of ideas, crude language is a tool to beat down those who would challenge their way of seeing the world, especially those allegedly in the right-wing superstructure of greedy imperialistic designs.

See also, "The Obscenity of Spencer Ackerman," and "The Commentocracy of Hate."

The Marginal Returns of Political Blogging

As readers know, I've been recently studying political demonization in the blogosphere.

In fact, I've developed something of a theory of secular demonology (by no means original), that hypothesizes a particular psychology of hatred that drives the leftosphere, which I've applied, for example, to "The Commentocracy of Hate." To be clear, I do not claim that conservatives are angels (there's a lot of right-wing extremism online, frequently defended by reference to strained notions of free political speech). Recent empirical history, however, demonstrates a powerful propensity among those on the left to mercilessly attack conservative partisans in government and online, going so far as mounting a political psychology of revenge.

I'm returning to this topic again after reading Jason Steck's outstanding essay on group think in the blogosphere.

Steck argues that blogging as a political medium has reached the point of diminishing marginal returns. Online partisans on both the left and right have no inclination toward objective critical analysis, and their respective commentocracies reward those blogs best able to demonize the other. Consequently, insightful, intellectual nuance and persusion get completely marginalized in the flaming haze of political battle:

Take a step back and review any political blog you like and you will immediately be struck by the sameness of the posts. They take the story of the day — invariably some substance-free “gaffe”, photo op, or partisan charge of corruption — and attach a laundry list of catastrophic impacts foretelling the end of the world if that candidate would be elected. Any reference to actual policy issues will be brief, insubstantial, and driven entirely by stereotypes. Comments threads will be infested by cut-and-paste repetitions of well-worn slogans and talking points, bereft of any engagement with the issues of the real world or any recognition that disagreement could indicate anything other than demonic possession. The scripts rule the day without any tolerance for deviation or criticism of any kind:

Mandatory Script #1: Obama is a “socialist” who is simultaneously too intellectually lightweight to be President yet a Machiavellian genius enough to be bamboozling everyone

Mandatory Script #2a: McCain is “McSame” seeking a third BushHilter term so that he can sell Social Security to Halliburton and bomb every country where brown people live in order to establish an American Empire that will revoke the Bill of Rights in order to establish a theocracy.

I'm getting a kick out of both of these "scripts," although if parsimony adds power, the brevity of Obama's script might provide a little value-added as the campaign moves forward.

Seriously though, Steck's onto something, although I don't think his resigned conclusion is completely warranted:

I care deeply about this election, but I find that writing about it publicly is pointless. Welcome to the brave new world of politics, where morons rule by rote.

I've been blogging for about a two-and-a-half years. Recently, when logging-on in the mornings, and especially when I check Memeorandum, I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. The most important stories on politics and public policy are often pushed to the side. Controversies serving as fodder for scandal rise to the top. The major bloggers weigh in with venomous attacks and snarky dismissals. One or two of these get picked up by the MSM, and then become "news" themselves. The White House or the major campaigns make a statement, and then it all starts over again in the morning.

I think there's more to it than that, however. I was introduced to the blogosphere by reading academic, high-brow blogs. I liked reading, for example, Daniel Drezner and Virginia Postrel. Folks like this are successful in their professions, and they've generated much of their readership trough their working reputations. Ann Althouse is a fabulous blogger as well (she also teaches law), and she's become something of a media sensation with her serious but stylistic online presence.

There are more examples like this, but what's happened with the partisan blogs is that they've become of the footsoldiers of the revolution, especially on the left. There's simply not going to be compromise when partisan bloggers and their communities see themselves in battle. It can get disgusting, as Steck notes in the comments:

Whenever ... a blog emerges that actually does attempt to provide balanced and/or mixed perspectives, they get shunned. To say that such blogs get "blacklisted" is not an exaggeration. They disappear from Memeorandum, are systematically denied links by the partisan blogs as punishment for their heresies, and are sometimes even subjected to campaigns designed to encourage other blogs to blacklist them. (For example, one blog owner I know of often disseminates orders to his co-bloggers instructing them not to link to other bloggers he doesn’t like or agree with and extends requests to the same effect to his other friends in the blogosphere, yet he claims publicly to welcome equally views from "left, right, and center".) There are more than a few commenters who do the exact same thing — trying to harass and defame any blog or writer who commits an act of heresy against their particular Mandatory Script....

For example, Newshoggers is an example of a blog that often [finds] stories that no one else is talking about at all. But they cancel out much of the value of that positive contribution by their relentless and abusive approach to blogs that they disagree with, usually ignoring contrary perspectives entirely but, when they do acknowledge them, often personally attacking the authors of those dissenting blogs or just lying about what those dissenters said in order to force-fit them into the pre-existing, demonized scripts. Glenn Greenwald is another exemplar of this tendency who has been rewarded massively for his hateful efforts as is FireDogLake. And those examples are in addition to the blog that I know for certain does outright blacklisting behind the scenes while publicly claiming to represent “left, right, and center”.

I'm betting that this "certain" blog is "The Moderate Voice" (aka "The Partisan Voice"), and I'd also note, interestingly, that the three blogs Steck mentions above are among the most prominent demonologists in the leftosphere.

Still, I too think folks should step back a bit, but my suggestion is for people to ask themselves what they hope to achieve by blogging? In my case, I visited many blogs years ago, and my comments at various sites became essay-length, so I thought I'd better get in the game.

It takes a while to find a niche. I started with a lot of cerebral posts, often unrelated to the headlines of the day, with very little partisan bite. I talked to more experienced bloggers who said they liked what they say, but recommended taking the gloves off. I have done that, while trying not to lose my academic side, with my style of lengthy, substantive posts of ranging ideas.

In any case, the blogging medium should be here to stay, or, at least until another platform comes along to replace the immediacy and potential impact of citizens' journalism. Most bloggers will not have a huge readership, but I'm confident that insight and intelligence are rewarded, and I'm frankly blown away sometimes at how awesome the blogosphere works as an alternative and competitor to traditional media.

All is not lost, for the moment at least. The returns of excellence in political blogging may have diminished some, but the ultimate output still carries substantial utility for politics.

Surrendering Reason to Hate?

Rick Moran's morning essay made me think about what I do as an online commentator.

The piece is a lengthy discourse on the craft of blogging. Moran explains his motives and development as an online writer, discussing some of the ups and downs of the trade. Of particular note is his discussion of partisan flame wars and the demonization of the other. Moran is introspective:

If my blog attracted only those who usually agreed with me and thought I was the bee’s knees when it came to commentary, blogging would be a marvelous daily exercise. But there is another side to blogging that most of us never talk about; the relentless, daily pounding of negativism, hurtful epithets, and outright spewing hatred that arrives in the form of comments and emails from the other side as well as other blogs linking and posting on something I’ve written.

We all like to think of ourselves as having thick skins and that such criticism rolls off our backs and never affects us. This is the macho element in blogging, one of its more unattractive and dishonest aspects. In this, some of us feel obligated to give back in kind, something I have done on too many occasions to count. Yes, I regret it. And believe me, I have often been the initiator of such ugliness.

Still, there are many bloggers on both the right and left who shame me with their equanimity in the face of the most virulent and nasty personal attacks. Ed Morrissey comes to mind on the right. The folks at Crooked Timber and Obsidian Wings on the left are generally cool in the face of such criticism as well.

But this is not a confessional post where I recognize my sins and ask forgiveness. I am what I am and doubt I will change. Rather, it is my intent to highlight the fact that despite my predilection for using violent language in my defense or to ridicule my political opponents, I have always granted them a certain rough integrity in their beliefs – that they are wrongheaded not evil; that they are arrogant and stupid, not unpatriotic or that they hate America.

Read the whole thing at the link (as well as the great additional resources, here and here). There's some conjecture as to whether longitudinally politics is nastier today than, say, 100 years ago. But one of the essay's payoffs is the (sort-of) suggestion of what-goes-around-comes-around for partisan attack-masters:

Those who accuse all liberals of being unpatriotic or un-American perhaps have no cause to grumble when an equally malicious lie like “racist” is directed at them. But having such an epithet tossed in my direction – especially as it has been done recently – I find to be reflective of a mindset that is terrified of open debate and thus resorts to twisting semantics in order to obscure a flawed critique. They can’t argue the issues so the magic word is applied and debate instantly ceases.

I think the conclusion here - that weaknesses in rational argumentation are remedied by resort to argumentum ad hominem - is basically right, although I'd suggest that the point about arguing that "all liberals" are unpatriotic (or pacifist, or irreligious, etc.), needs a bit of elaboration.

I started blogging precisely to combat the anti-Americanism and postmodern nihilism that had infected debates on America's post-9/11 foreign policy. At first I was a bit surprised when attacked as "racist" (or fascist, or Nazi, or neocon warmonger, etc.). But I soon realized, seriously, that these were people who would do me physical harm if they had the chance, or at least some have said.

But I differ in debate from my antagonists in that I seek to maintain a morality of reason in argumentation. Sometimes I'm sloppy by attacking the "left" in general, but when I deploy terms like "nihilist" it's in the descriptive, analytical sense, rather than as an effort to inflict emotional or psychological pain. In other words, there's a ontological basis to my partisan repudiations. I seek to understand and explain what's underlying the postmodern hatred of the anti-everything sensibilities of the American left.

For example, I'm coming around to fuller understanding of the notion of secular demonology.

While certainly both sides engage in extremist attacks on the other, there appears to be a difference in the attack culture of central players in the partisan debates. Folks like those at Daily Kos and Firedoglake, for example, are the netroots base of the Democratic Party, people who are embraced and recruited in the partisan battles of left-wing establishment politics. This is not true on the right, for the most part. While I'm sure some comment threads at major conservative blogs get out of hand on occasion, it is not the explicit policy of conservatives to demonize their foes (while Daily Kos openly advocates it).

The most recent outburst of left-wing demonization involved last week's shootings at Unitarian Universalist Church in Tennessee. The leftists became positively unglued, seeing in Jim David Adkisson a footsoldier of conservative hatred. The actions of a lone, unstable killer became the basis for smearing the entire GOP universe.

Elizabeth Scalia discusses how Adkisson's case illuminates our frequent descents into partisan recrimination:

Initial reports were that Adkisson had “problems with Christians.” Later reports suggested he also had “problems” with “the liberal movement” and with gays. Predictably, people on both the right and left immediately staked out claims of victimhood and identified each other as the true culprits upon whom both blame and condemnation must rain down. “They” inspired Adkisson to kill those worshipers, no, to kill those progressives, no, to kill those … those …

Those human beings.

If you’re wondering who “they” is, “they” is us, losing a little more of our shared humanity every day, as we increasingly insulate ourselves away from the “others” who do not hold the same worldview as we do. We label ourselves as belonging to some respectable group of believers, or agnostics, or liberals, or conservatives, and we live, work, socialize, and blog — as much as life will allow — amongst our “respectable” peers, in our “respectable” echo chambers. We label the “others” as disrespectable and then commence disrespecting.

It begins with name-calling, which seems so innocuous, so sandbox. Well, name-calling is infantile behavior, but it is hardly innocuous. As marijuana is to heroin, name-calling is to diminished humanity — the gateway. It begins the whole process of dehumanization. Call someone a name and they immediately become “less human” to you, and the less human they seem, the easier they are to hate and to destroy. A “fetus,” after all, is easier to destroy than a “baby.”

Thus, George W. Bush is “Chimpy McHitler.” Hillary Clinton is “a pig in a pantsuit.” Barack Obama is “O-Bambi.” Cindy McCain, who has exhibited some courage and laudable compassion in her life, is reduced to a “pill-popping beer-frau,” and so forth. From there it is smooth sailing down an ever-descending river of hatred, until we are incapable of seeing anything good in the “other,” both because we have willfully hardened our hearts, and because our hate — especially when it is supported by a group of like minds — feels safe and inviolable.

Recently I asked rabid Bush-haters if they could manage to say “one good thing” about the president. Predictably, they could not.

They are capable of sarcasm: “One good thing is he will die someday.” “One good thing is that he can’t serve three terms.” Once, when pressed, someone sneered: “He managed to marry a librarian who could read and explain books to him.”

Scalia notes that both sides do it - both sides are unwilling to find that "one good thing" to say about their political enemies. They're ready to "surrender reason to hate."

While I don't disagree altogether, it seems that most of the recent examples of surrendering to hate can be found on the left, for example following the deaths of Tim Russert, Jesse Helms, and Tony Snow. Robert Novak's announcement last week of illness offered another opportunity for left-wing demonization.

In contrast, when Senator Edward Kennedy was rushed to the hospital in May, to be diagnosed with a brain tumor, I found nothing but well-wishing across the conservative blogosphere.

Ben Johnson offered an explanation for all of this in "Kennedy's Illness, and the Left's." At base, for Johnson, there appears to be a deficit of the soul on the left, an absence of divine grace. This gap removes a prohibitive moral restraint in left-wing partisans and preconditions them to cheer the pain, suffering, and demise of conservatives.

I've gone even further in suggesting that Marxist ideology - which guides the class conscious, anti-imperialist project of contemporary "progressives" - provides leftists with a doctrine of hatred, a political demonology to drive the dehumanization campaigns against their opponents:

As a kind of universal secular Church, Marxism succeeded, in a historically unprecedented way, in satisfying the ideological, political, and psychological needs of marginalized and alienated intellectuals scattered all over the world. It became the first secular Umma of intellectuals....

Marxism has always been little more than pseudo-universalism, a false promise of intellectual and moral universalism, for an exclusive ideology, by definition, cannot be universalistic. Far from a symbolic design for human fellowship and peaceful coexistence of societies, cultures, and civilizations, Marxism rests on the assumption of radical evil and also on the quest for enemies.

This quest for enemies consumes far left-wing partisans. It is an endless search seeking to delegitimize and dehumanize those who would threaten the safety of a secular, redistributionist world of exclusive false brotherhood and psychological security.

This is why I think there are variations in the propensity to surrender to hate. The left's psychopolitical agenda is "clothed in darkness." It is this very difficult for them to find that "one good thing" about those with whom they differ.

The Left's Demonology of Vengeance

At the same time that Barack Obama's been presumptiously preparing his presidential transition team, the hard left forces of the nihilist left are sharpening their knives in preparation for a campaign of legal vengeance against the Bush administration's alleged record of war crimes in the battle against global terror.

Salon, for example, ran a piece earlier this week entitled "Exposing Bush's Historic Abuse of Power," which suggests the formation of a new "Church Commission" to investigate domestic surveillance in the Bush years (the article includes the obligatory Nazi Reichsadler pictured above).

Also, there's news this week that left-wing bloggers (and their allies on the Paulbot right) are mounting a program of electoral mobilization against Democrats who supported the FISA reform bill just passed in Congress. Leading the pack is Jane Hamsher, who has teamed with fringe libertarians to form a group called The Strange Bedfellows. The organization's goal is to promote an "accountability" campaign of legal recrimination against the administration's "lawless surveillance state."

One gets a good sense of how intense are the demands for extremist retribution in Matt Stoler's post, "Democratic Congressional Candidate Alan Grayson on Iraq Reckoning: 'We'll Put People in Prison'":

One of the most exciting candidates I've met this cycle is Alan Grayson, a high profile trial lawyer who has been suing defense contractors for fraud, and is now running for Florida's eighth district in central Florida. I spent some time with him at Netroots Nation, and took video. Usually I have to push candidates to become more aggressive, in Grayson's case, he pushed me. Grayson is part of a new crew of progressive professionals, people like Darcy Burner and Donna Edwards with a tremendous track record of success in fields other than politics who are crossing over into the progressive sector out of a sheer revulsion of where this country is headed. It's different than the civil rights era of liberalism and the single issue liberalism of the 1980s, much more fearless.

Because of his track record suing defense contractors, Grayson is completely uninterested and unintimidated by ridiculous arguments about secrecy and national security. He thinks that war crimes have been committed, that people need to be put in prison, and that we absolutely cannot let bygones be bygones with the 2000-2008 era.

That last section really sums it up.

For the nihilist left, few are putting a priority on improving the econony, rebuilding infrastruce, or exploring means toward American energy independence - some of the top issues facing the mass of rank-and-file Democratic Party voters. What's motivated the hard left hordes are subterranean questions of lawbreaking by the administration. The agenda of electing "agressive progressives" is code language for mounting a campaign of revenge against Republicans who are routinely alleged to have taken the country "recklessly toward war. Just this week Representitive Dennis Kucinich, a leader of antiwar contingent in Congress, held hearings on Capitol Hill to investigate the administration for "leading the country to war under false pretenses."

Recall that the Iraq war, of course, was launched under a bipartisan congressional mandate, but within months of the same Democrats in Congress - who supported America's goal to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction - turned around for cheap partisan purposes to advocate the craven withdrawal from Iraq, the abandonment of our troops, and the surrender to the forces of Islamist totalitarianism.

As for the legal case for war crimes, the issue's debateable, and establishing them as a top priority in 2009 would create a political circus. The administration might do well to prevent a massive witch hunt by issues blanket pardons before leaving office.

Of course, it's hard to see the left's push for criminal prosecutions as more than diabolical partisan revenge. These developments, indeed, are the natural consequence of the left's doctrine of hatred. The incessant calls for criminal prosecution against the Bush administration satisfies the radical left's psychological need for vengeance against the percieved slights of intellectual and political marginalization.

It's not enough to organize for a restoration of the public spirit in health care, transportation, or other areas of needed revitalization, under a possible Democratic administration. The modern ideological hatred of the secular left demands nothing short of a totalizing political persecution for the very democratically-legitimated conservative leaders who have run the run the country for the last seven years.

The Commentocracy of Hate

"Okay, tell me something I don't know..."

This was my basic sense, while first reading through the Politico's feature article, "The Commentocracy Rises Online."

Except the article DID tell me something new.

The piece starts with the story of Erick Erickson of Redstate, who had his all of his personal contact information, including his work phone number, posted at Daily Kos in the comments thread:

Site moderators removed his information, but not before Erickson received a number of ominous phone calls and e-mail messages, including one from a writer who threatened to “rape my wife and unborn child.” He placed a call to the FBI in response, and nothing came of the threats.

“That was first time anything like that happened to me,” he says, “and I was really taken aback, but now it’s almost run of the mill.”

Behold the Commentocracy, where big ideas and rough remarks sit shoulder to shoulder, altogether transforming the nature of the Web and of journalism.

Okay, the "commentocracy." I'm hip ... the blogosphere's a rough place.

So rough, in fact, according to the Politico, that some top bloggers and mainstream news sites simply do without commenting - why waste the time and energy moderating a bunch of uncultured yahoos?

Not Daily Kos, though. Commenters there are essentially team members, community participants adding "content" to the blog:

Kos Editor Susan Gardner recalls her own hesitancy in posting comments when she started out as a reader on the site back in 2003. At the time, she says, there were only 8,000 users who had registered to comment, compared with more than 170,000 today.

Active commenters, though, remain a relatively small and self-selected group. “For every 10 who read,” Gardner continues, “one will sign up as a reader. And of every 10, only one will comment, and of every 10 who do, one will become a diarist.”

A ratings system allows readers to recommend their favorite missives, thus fashioning a commenting meritocracy, or at least hierarchy. “For the most part, what you do see is people are rising purely on merit or at least on popularity,” she said. “They’re giving community what the community wants, which is different than the outside world.“

Mindful that in the past, certain incendiary or inappropriate comments have been used, most famously by Bill O’Reilly, as though they represented the views of Daily Kos and all its readers, the community has vigilantly taken up the cause of self-policing against online dejecta, be it bigotry, impertinence or spam.

Frequent open threads on the front page offer commenters a high-profile outlet for whatever’s on their minds.

“Commenters aren’t just commenters on our site, like they are on Politico,” says Gardner. "They are creators of content.”

This is both revealing and highly significant.

As noted in "Progressivism Goes Mainstream?", Markos Moulitsas considers his blogging community as the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and the Kos kids certainly throw their weight around, for example, in pressuring the Austin-American Statesman to renounce its ironic front-page story covering last week's Netroots Nation convention.

The significance, though, is in what the Kos commentocracy signifies. While newspapers like the New York Times debate eliminating comment boards, the hate-filled threads at Daily Kos are considered legitimate intellectual content. The notion that Kos' comments are moderated is laughable. Sure, maybe some posts are taken down, but one can read entire threads, with hundreds and hundreds of comments, to find ready and vile examples of demonism.

Check out these examples from the Kos diary, "Lieberman Goes The Full Zell."

From "Dallas Doc":

Joe Lieberman has consistently advocated that Democrats respond to the lies, the manipulations, the tactical and strategic disasters of the Bush presidency by going along with everything the Boy King wanted. Not to do so, in Joe's mind, would cause vengeance to rain down on Democrats from the mighty Republicans. Is this not a doctrine of appeasement in its purest form?

Joe, of course, is consistent only in being a warmonger. He is a tool of right-wing Israeli politics, and a creature of defense industry contractors (big in CT). If our politics has descended to "Strong = eager to kill" then God help us all. He won't do much for Lieberkrieg.

And this one, from "Red State Progressive":

If Hell exists...

There is a special place for Joe Lieberman.

Also included are photoshopped graphic images, with one picturing Senator Lieberman as a "giant douche" bag, which is captioned, "No offense to douches intended..."

So, with Daily Kos we see the commentocracy as essentially the Wild West of secular demonology.

Where at others left-wing outfits, like the Huffington Post, the problem of hatred is recognized and remedied (Huffington Post frequently closes its entries to comments, for example, for its report on the Times Square bombing in March and after publishing its obituary for Jesse Helms more recently), at Kos the commentocracy of hate is celebrated as "creative."

Perhaps it might be the case that Daily Kos, and other "progressive" blogs will see their influence fade upon the accession of Barack Obama to power in January, should the Illinois Senator prevail in November.

It's wishful thinking to bank on such an outcome, but perhaps with a Democratic victory the demonology of progressive blogging will become little seen and not heard among the more civilized practitioners of online communications.

Progressivism Goes Mainstream?

Sometimes I ask myself "why"?

Why worry about the likes of Markos Moulitsas and the angry hordes of the hard-left blogosphere? These folks can't genuinely threaten traditional decency and order. They're nothing more than an extreme fringe, unnoticed by the great silent majority of Americans, to be tolerated, even indulged once in a while, right?

I'd say yes, but for the life of me Kos and others like him get a lot of attention, and their bullying totalitarianism gets results.

It turns out that the Austin American-Statesman has repudiated and removed from its website a front-page story on last week's Netroots Nation convention at the insistence of Daily Kos.

An article, critical of the netroots radicals, was written by Patrick Beach, a "featured writer" at the paper. In turn, Greg Mitchell, at Daily Kos, attacked Beach as writing an "opinion" piece instead of hard news:

The new newspaper trend - even extending to boring old AP - of encouraging reporters to not merely report but opine in their "news" pieces reared its ugly head again this morning by way of a front page story in the Austin American-Statesman on Saturday's Netroots Nation events.

Patrick Beach, a feature writer at the paper who once described himself as a "raging moderate," repeatedly described the gathering in stereotypes that better fit the aging Old Left of years ago than the much younger Netroots of today. I mean, how many of you have ever read much of Chomsky...?

What was Beach's sin? Hitting a little too close to home, I'd say. Here's a sample:

Name-dropping Al Gore and his call for a switch to clean, renewable energy within 10 years was enough to pull whoops of approval from the 2,000 or 3,000 marauding liberals gathered for Netroots Nation at the Austin Convention Center on Saturday morning.

So when the former vice president and Nobel Prize co-winner made a surprise — and cleverly scripted — appearance during U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's talk, it looked like the conference might turn into a faint-in.

Talk that Pelosi (who is arguably so left-leaning that her parenthetical should be D-Beijing) would have a Very Special Guest had been buzzing about the conference of liberal bloggers, pols and media types since it began Thursday (it concludes today). But it wasn't clear to attendees that something was afoot until a schedule change handed out Saturday morning indicated the speaker's talk would last 45 minutes longer than previously indicated.

Not that Gore's appearance was necessary to whip up the troops.

From the beginning, it was clear these people were convinced the electoral map would be repainted with a brush sopping with blue paint come November.

Perhaps the piece is a bit satirical, but it's not unlike what's published routinely on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, which includes an offbeat news story at the bottom of column three every morning, or the Los Angeles Times, which features "Column One" daily, with many of the feature stories comprising fun-loving takes on the quirks of life.

No matter ... the newspaper caved:

Readers expect front-page stories to speak directly and clearly about events and issues. Eliminating the possibility of misunderstanding from our work is a critical part of our daily newsroom routine. When we communicate in a way that could be misinterpreted, we fail to meet our standards.

Our front-page story Sunday about the Netroots Nation convention included doses of irony and exaggeration. It made assertions (that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might find herself at home politically in Beijing, for example) and characterizations ("marauding liberals" was one) meant to amuse. For many readers, we failed.

In trying for a humorous take on the Netroots phenomenon without labeling it something other than a straightforward news story, we compromised our standards.

I guess that's it then. No more room for irony in serious journalism. I somehow doubt Jonathan Swift would be amused.

But there's more: Katherine Seelye reports that Markos Moulitsas - again - has announced that his progressive movement's the new mainstream:

Back in the early 1990s, with the rise of talk radio, conservative commentators derisively dubbed newspapers, magazines and broadcast television as the “mainstream media.” More recently, with the run-up to the Iraq war, liberal bloggers joined in, abbreviating the term to MSM.

But now the Internet has overtaken most newspapers and broadcasts as a source of news, and some on the left say the lingo ought to reflect that.

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the DailyKos Web site, the biggest liberal hub online, wrote on Monday that the heretofore “mainstream media” should be called the “traditional media.” Calling it mainstream implies that the Internet is fringe, he said, when in fact liberal bloggers, at least, are “representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we’re selling.”

Seelye notes, thankfully, that Moulitsas' megalomania hasn't gone unnoticed:

As you might imagine, not everyone agrees that Kos now represents the mainstream, and some have been mocking him (“If Moulitsas’s netroots were truly the mainstream, why would they attack a MODERATE Democrat who rarely strayed from the party line?” one asked, in reference to his debate Friday with Harold Ford, chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.)

That's fine, although leftist hopes are indeed high that the long-awaited proletarian revolution's coming in November.

Ezra Klein, a prominent left-wing writer in attendence at Netroots Nation, asked of the event's political significance, "Is Social Democracy A-Coming?"

It turns out that Klein's vision of this coming millenarian social democracy includes the elimination of meat from the diet. That's right: Meat's the new Marlboro, a socially incorrect health hazard that should be phased out of American diets to save the environment (meat production leaves a larger "carbon footprint").

This is the kind of progressivism that the netroots hordes want to ram down Americans' throats. But let's be honest: While perhaps the netroots hordes aren't up on Chomsky, they're certainly right at home with the kind of drastic change called for by '60-era ideology.

Indeed, Moulitsas has a new book forthcoming that offers a manifesto for today's netroots progressivism, Taking On the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era. Here's the product description:

The Sixties are over and the rules of power have been transformed. In order to change the world one needs to know how to manipulate the media, not just march in the streets. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, otherwise known as "Kos," is today's symbol of digital activism, giving a voice to everyday people. In "Taking on the System," Kos has taken a cue from his revolutionary predecessor's doctrine, Saul Alinksy's Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, and places this epic hand-book in today's digital era, empowering every American to make a difference in the 21st century.

There's some sheer hypocrisy - if not irony - inherent in this blurb.

Markos Moulitsas, who proclaims himself a digital revolutionary in his new book, sponsors attacks on news coverage of the very radicalism of his own movement - with the desired result achieved in the capitulation of the Austin American-Statesman to the left's totalitarian thought police.

But lest readers forget: Daily Kos is the blogosphere's top portal for the left's secular demonology of hate. Not only are moderate Democratic Party officials savagely attacked, the most extreme racist, anti-Semitic essays are published regularly on the blog.

Moulitsas himself is not above attacking John McCain for his teeth. As I've noted before:

The Kos page still hosts the rabidly anti-Semitic entry, "Eulogy before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel."

Kos himself recently attacked John McCain's physical appearance, ridiculing the Arizona Senator in a post entitled "McCain's Teeth."The "teeth" post is particularly egregious, considering that the McCain's teeth were broken off at the gumline by his North Vietnamese captors in 1968.

I think people really need to step back and think about this.

Kristin Power argued recently that the Kos kids hardly represent mainstream Democrat voters, people who are more concerned about paying their mortgage or securing health insurance than about FISA wiretaps.

And she's right, but incomplete. Moulitsas is onto something when he makes the case that the revolution's gone online, at least in the sense that the radical left bloggers are the "squeaky wheel" of the current Democratic Party policy base. Sure leftists lost on the FISA domestic surveillance bill, but look at the left's gleeful triumphalism this week on Barack Obama's world tour.

An Obama administration will restore 1930s-era pacifism as "mainstream" American foreign policy. Obama has said he'd consider war crimes trials for Bush administration officials - a main quiver in the leftosphere's Jacobin agenda - upon taking power. Obama's proposed dismantling America's nuclear arsenal. He reportedly had no problem with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a Palestian terrorist cell, providing security for his visit to Ramallah on the West Bank. And he's on board the radical global warming agenda, pushed by the Al Gore-faction of the Democratic Party left.

And that's just a sample in foreign policy! Domestically, from affirmative action to taxes, Barack Obama's a radical's dream.

So, while folks can quibble on whether or not Moulitsas represents the mainstream, the big picture suggests that should Obama be elected to office, he'll be pulled even further left than he already is. Call it a realignment or a revolution, but it's a direction in which many traditional Americans would not rather not go.