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Author Archive for Olly Ruff

Matt Stoller Will Brook No Tomfoolery

Published by Olly Ruff on April 19, 2007 in Blogs vs. MSM, Netroots and Seriously. 8 Comments

… although he does provide us with a glimpse into the life of an A-list blogger here. We eagerly await the next installment:

Matt Stoller's "Annoying" Email

Is it just me, or does this seem like a slightly unwarranted response? If the journalist contacting Stoller was from an ideological foe like, say, the American Spectator, that would be one thing — the stuff about “slippery questions” and “ethical responsibilities” might well read like a prelude to a hatchet job. But having a go at a dependably lefty publication like Mother Jones for their temerity in requesting an interview? Dude, that is ice cold.

Too Soon, Too Late: Gun Commentary After Virginia Tech

Published by Olly Ruff on April 18, 2007 in Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Rhetoric and Virginia Politics. 0 Comments

In the wake of the Virginia Tech murders, the inevitable wave of commentary about gun ownership in America continues to roll in. Associated to it there is a (perhaps more interesting) meta-argument: who is most tastelessly dragging politics into the somber aftermath of a national tragedy? As usual, the answer appears to be absolutely everyone on the left/right; so far, the only person staking out territory in the impending meta-meta-debate over the propriety of tastelessly politicizing the aforementioned tasteless politicization is Matthew Yglesias.

Tasteless politicization is in the eye of the beholder, however. To an advocate of concealed carry, the observation that a legally armed student or faculty member might have made a huge difference on the day in question is nothing more or less than common sense. To an advocate of gun control, the observation that Cho Seung-Hui’s actions were expedited by his ability as a resident alien to legally purchase handguns is similarly uncontroversial. Of course, common sense is another thing that is liable to be interpreted rather differently from blog to blog. In that spirit, former Suckster Chris Bray has some worthwhile things to say.

Meanwhile, there’s something muted and occasionally plaintive about most of the pro-gun-control commentary — even the Brady Center seems to have acknowledged that the issue is not really in play at the moment. (Alex Koppelman bemoans this state of affairs in Salon today.) Affiliated websites like Stop the NRA define the problem as follows:

…it is much too easy for the wrong people to get high-powered, deadly weapons and our leaders fail to do anything about the problem. [Emphasis removed.]

As always, it is extremely easy to determine who the “wrong people” are after the fact, and rather harder to do so in advance. Stop the NRA’s website doesn’t contain anything more specific than the organization’s name.

It should be noted that this kind of magical thinking is hardly confined to the anti-gun movement. Roy Edroso links to this wonderful thing, for instance:

And I’m sorry, some will really think me foolish, but I don’t think dorms should be co-ed, so that crazed, jealous boyfriends can enter their girlfriends’ dorms and kill them and the innocent young men who come to their aid. If it had been a single-sex dorm, the killer might not have been able to enter so readily.

Call me a pessimist, but I don’t think a rule forcing crazed, jealous boyfriends to loiter outside the dorm instead of waltzing right in would necessarily have the desired effect. Any prediction tailored this specifically is vulnerable to reductio ad absurdum - after all, if Virginia Tech refused to admit Korean students as a matter of policy, Cho wouldn’t have been in a position to murder 32 people there. (If anyone has seen this argument being made with a straight face, please let us know in comments.)

The endless wrangling can be construed in a light that is at least vaguely positive. A hope that there might be a way, in principle, to somehow prevent mass murders from happening in the future is a fundamentally decent, abstract human impulse. In order for it to be articulated as policy, though, it must be tempered by other human impulses, such as the suspicion that this is all the fault of the bastards on the other side.

Marcotte Polo

Published by Olly Ruff on February 16, 2007 in Blog Consultants, Blog Fights, Democrats, Elections and John Edwards. 2 Comments

Amanda Marcotte’s account of her short stint on the Edwards campaign is up at Salon, and a good read.

“Reasonable people,” I thought, “can tell the difference between a personal blog post and those I’ll write for the campaign.” What I naively failed to understand was that there is no relationship between what reasonable people think and what will be used in a partisan bout of mud-slinging.
This, by the way, from someone who watched a goofy burger-themed parody of “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” last year and was moved to write this marvellously overwrought thing. Overall reaction to the Salon piece splits fairly predictably, with some of the choicest parting shots coming from those who have previously been on the receiving end of Marcotte’s legendary reasonableness.

There has been widespread bipartisan blogger sentiment that the Marcotte-McEwan scandal was blown wildly out of proportion, largely because there is also widespread bipartisan blogger sentiment that Bill Donohue is a ludicrous person to whom no political campaign should be paying attention. After minimal exposure to Bill Donohue, it is hard not to sympathize with this to some extent. On the other hand, what credible presidential campaign allows itself to be so successfully mau-maued by his Catholic League of America? (Well, Kerry-Edwards ‘04, for one.)

Moreover, as Bill previously asked, what the hell were Edwards’ people thinking when they hired Marcotte, anyway? Assuming they gave her blog at least a cursory inspection before making the offer, this cannot possibly have come as a surprise to them: the reasons she’s unemployable as a campaign staffer are the same reasons she’s popular and successful as a rabble-rousing blogger. (Then again, if a relatively large constituency on the internet translated proportionately to the real world, then Ron Paul would be a viable presidential candidate.) If any leftish bloggers are still surprised at the feeding frenzy that took place, imagine Michelle Malkin being hired as the online face of the McCain campaign and then claiming that “In Defense of Internment” wasn’t a big deal.

Hopefully, it’s not all bad news for Marcotte: her blogosphere Q rating — in both of the crucial love-her and love-to-hate-her categories — is higher than it was a month ago, and this will presumably open some other doors (as foreshadowed by Michael Bérubé here). She doesn’t have much of a shot at a career in mainstream politics, but that was never really in the cards in the first place.

And sometimes, amidst all the partisan mud-slinging, it’s hard to tell who the reasonable people are anymore.

Obama: Stealth Muslim!

Published by Olly Ruff on December 30, 2006 in Barack Obama, Internecine Battles, Middle East, Religion, Rhetoric and White House '08. 19 Comments

So, Barack Obama’s middle name happens to be Hussein, and this fact has been slowly working its way into general media consciousness for a few months now — most notably when Republican strategist Ed Rogers began pointedly mentioning it on “Hardball.” On December 18, plucky sub-Coulter Debbie Schlussel took this insinuation to its logical conclusion:

…is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam?
Absolutely the most charitable interpretation of this is that Schlussel believes Obama should, instead of pursuing a career in politics, be parachuted in behind enemy lines to work as some sort of “undercover Muslim.” However, she continues:
Where will his loyalties be?
By this logic, one would presume that Schlussel isn’t too happy about Obama being a Senator, never mind holding any higher office. After all, the man’s father was a Muslim at one point in his life, for crying out loud!

Although the comment thread at Schlussel’s original post has continued to thrive, response over the last couple of weeks has not been disproportionate; at any rate, it has not been as disproportionate as I would have liked. Media Matters had a field day, as they tend to do when people say such transcendentally stupid things, and responses on the right ranged from pained to exasperated to really exasperated to really, really exasperated. The angelically beaming Brendan Nyhan points out the comparison with anti-Catholic suspicions of JFK (although really this makes even less sense, as JFK was at least Catholic), following up an interesting earlier post covering some more whimsical sniping about the size of Obama’s ears.

The measure of a presidential campaign is, in large part, how it deals with this sort of thing. (If we ever hear an official statement from the Obama camp regarding the candidate’s ears, then he’s toast.) Schlussel’s slur, at once serious and deeply non-serious, is a gift to a talented politican.

If I were working for Obama, I’d be looking for an excuse to make the “Hussein” non-issue into a signature moment, preferably sometime after the New Year (and after the execution of Saddam is no longer a story). A judiciously crafted public response could turn out to be an enduring image of a candidate calling for tolerance in the face of hysteria; unfortunately, it could also turn out to be an enduring spectacle of an otherwise dignified and serious man shouting at people on the internet. So, to avoid the latter possibility, I’d be looking around for someone other than Ed Rogers to raise the story’s profile in the old media, and I’d be wondering: how long has it been since Tom Tancredo did any bad ethnic humor in public?

Can someone in public life make sure he sees a copy of this Schlussel thing? Hopefully he won’t notice that “Schlussel” is a suspiciously foreign-sounding name.

Steal This Election

Published by Olly Ruff on November 7, 2006 in Blog Fights, Democrats, Election Night, Midterms '06, National Politics and Republicans. 0 Comments

It’s not yet clear which party will end up in charge of the House and Senate  — although disclaimers notwithstanding, the prognosis is obviously good for the Dems. But there’s one thing we can be sure of: whoever wins, the other side is going to claim some of the close races were tampered with. Since 2000, the fix is always in, and today may serve as the rightosphere’s first real chance to start yelling about it.

There are a few obvious factors influencing this trend: firstly, everyone seems determined to recapture the spirit of good-natured exuberance that washed over the country in November 2000, but in addition, we’re also now able to read stories from across the country — sometimes sourced and corroborated, sometimes not — establishing that Democrats are shameless crooks. The story that best exemplifies the role of the blogosphere in stoking election-related paranoia is probably this marvellous thing about alleged sabotage of Republican GOTV efforts, which provoked some characteristically level-headed commentary over at Free Republic before turning out to be made up.

Meanwhile, the narrative in the leftosphere remains — as it has for as long as the leftosphere has been in existence — that Republicans are committed to disenfranchising ordinary hard-working Americans. Thus every bit of sleazy electioneering must be termed “voter suppression,” regardless of whether anything is actually being suppressed, while Michael Moore — a man who is to English prose what H.L. Mencken was to documentary filmmaking — continues to uncover nefarious plots at every turn:

They will fight like dogs for the next 24 hours — relentless, unforgiving, nonstop action to squeeze every last conservative voter out of the house on election day. While the rest of us go about our day today, tens of thousands of Republican volunteers are knocking on doors, making phone calls, and lining up rides to the polls.
He almost manages to make it sound sinister, as well as tedious. An anguished cry goes up across the rightosphere: who will be their RFK Jr?

Maf54, Where Are You?

Published by Olly Ruff on October 8, 2006 in Blog Fights, Instant Messaging and Republicans. 2 Comments

After several days of Foleymania, the blogosphere has spoken: It is resolved that absolutely virtually everyone agrees that middle-aged congressmen should not be exchanging sexually explicit IMs with teenagers of either gender, especially if they’re under 18 (but even if they’re not), especially if it also constitutes workplace harassment.

Now, the fun part — that of figuring out how much this is going to hurt the Republicans and whether there’s any conceivable way of blaming it on the Democrats or ABC instead — is only just getting started, and a small sub-fight — that of deciding which side of the blogosphere is proving itself to be the most hypocritical/opportunistic/crazy — is also bubbling away nicely. As with every other news story of the last five years, the Foley scandal exemplifies the culture of corruption imposed upon Washington by a power-mad Bush administration, while simultaneously revealing the tragic consequences of the heathen licentiousness promoted by Democrats across this great land. Also, there has to be something here that can be blamed on Glenn Reynolds:

There are other sites, large and small, that have linked to Wild Bill as well — that’s also wrong. We won’t be providing links to any of these posts.
concludes the above-linked Think Progress post, primly. Not wanting to link to “Wild Bill” — the blogger who printed the former page’s name along with a bunch of pictures — is understandable, but not linking to a guy you’re claiming did link to it is problematic when he actually didn’t. (James Joyner analyzes this error here.) The trouble with this supposedly-principled omission of links is that people using Think Progress as a clearinghouse don’t necessarily check these things.

The link is the currency of the blogosphere, and any post that omits links is always the more suspect for it. “Read the whole thing” may be one of the most banal things a blogger can say to their audience, but that doesn’t make it bad advice.

Speaking of bad advice, attempts to quibble over the age question don’t seem likely either to make the story go away any faster or to make Foley suddenly appear sympathetic. Also, it’s hard to see the percentage in fretting over the fact that Democrats are getting as much electoral mileage as they can out of the erstwhile Maf54’s astonishing lack of discretion or propriety. Why shouldn’t they? Politics is full of lemons, but on those rare occasions when you’re handed a glass of lemonade, the thing is to enjoy drinking it.

Some kind of medal, though, must be reserved for the peerless Ben Shapiro, who follows up a predictable non sequitur claim that “studies show that homosexuals are disproportionately prone to pedophilia” with this gem:

On what moral basis do Democrats condemn Foley? They have no basis for moral outrage, since they have championed the destruction of traditional morality for decades.
With this kind of adept spin management, we can expect to still be hearing about Mark Foley well into the 2008 primary season*.

  • In fairness, the scrum begins November 8, 2006.

The Blog Post Is Half-Full

Published by Olly Ruff on September 7, 2006 in Blog Fights, Democrats, Lamont v. Lieberman and Relaunches. 2 Comments

As impatiently anticipated in this space on Tuesday, the Lieberman ‘06 blog has been loosed upon the world. Despite the admonishments of Atrios, as backed up by DavidNYC and other luminaries, the comments are filling up briskly with anti-Joe sentiment. (Albeit nowhere near as fast as Atrios’ own threads.)

Alas, the only real entertainment to be had is in speculating on the layers of identity within the commentariat. Which are paid stooges from the Lieberman campaign, posting deliberately incendiary remarks to make the Lamont campaign look bad? Which are volunteer stooges from the Lamont campaign, posting obviously amateurish incendiary remarks to make the Lieberman campaign look like they’re planting deliberately incendiary remarks? How many different people are posting as “Ann Coulter,” and are they all on the same side?

The site’s design is fairly dreary, and the sense that has characterized the 2006 Lieberman campaign — that of expectations cruelly dashed — is ably captured by the policy of having every post contain a “Read The Full Blog Post” link, even when (as is frequently the case) there is no more blog post to read. Meanwhile, the tireless exuberance of the comment posse is beginning to resemble that of an unruly high-school class, and within a few posts the blog itself had devolved into the very thing Atrios originally predicted: singling out random anonymous commenters as being representative of the Lamont campaign. (The approved neologism for this is nutpicking. I am more or less resigned to it, but am going to hold out for as long as possible in the hope that someone can come up with something equally clever but less overtly anatomical.)

By all rights this should be hilarious, but for some reason it makes me feel sad instead. Perhaps it’s a seasonal thing.

Caught In A Trap And I Can’t Back Out ‘Cause I Hate You Too Much, Baby

Published by Olly Ruff on September 5, 2006 in Campaigns, Lamont v. Lieberman and Website Design. 4 Comments

Atrios pointed out yesterday — for the purposes of warning people away from it, so without an accompanying link — the relaunch of the Lieberman campaign blog (or alleged blog), scheduled for today. (As of 4:30 PM EDT, the new Lieberman site is still completely dead. This is not the only respect in which the Lieberman campaign could learn from Phoenix Suns G Raja Bell, who at least managed a countdown timer.)

It will certainly be an accomplishment for the Lieberman campaign to have a presence in the ’sphere that (we devoutly hope) doesn’t use a default Blogger template, so this is already a big step forward from the L/L primary. However, this quote from Atrios deserves attention:

A reminder that the Lieberman blog is apparently going live tomorrow. It’s basically going to be a trap to entice people to say mean things about the Last Honest Man so they can go whine to the press about how mean everyone is unlike Stay the Course Joe.
Ah, yes. A “trap” to “entice” otherwise reasonable people to say “mean things” about Joe Lieberman. If there’s one thing the leftosphere has been short on this year, it’s people flying off the handle about Joe Lieberman. Were I working for Joe ‘06, the first thing I’d be looking for would be a cunning scheme to get bloggers to break cover and let their true feelings show.

Seriously, it could be argued that Lieberman has the worst profile in the leftosphere of anyone, ever, including George W. Bush. A trap designed to accomplish this goal would presumably resemble… a keyboard?

Update: Having given this some more thought, maybe a keyboard with a big neon sign pointing at it.

Who Are The Ad Wizards Who Came Up With This One?

Published by Olly Ruff on August 24, 2006 in Campaigns, Daily Kos, Lamont v. Lieberman, National Politics and RNC. 3 Comments

Unintended amusement abounds at this GOP press release, which is either an attempt to damage the Lamont CT SEN campaign by linking it to Daily Kos or vice versa. To a devotee of attack journalism and smear campaigns, it’s a rather unsatisfying document; we carry no brief for Kos here, but when the slings and arrows are this poor — or this poor — it’s hard not to remark upon it.

After a puzzling focus on the fact that Markos Moulitsas apparently went on holiday this summer and has recently returned, the release warms up by collecting a few of Kos’ pricklier comments — the infamous “Screw ‘em,” etc — and chides him for calling Joe Lieberman a “sore loser.” If you recall the “Sore Loserman” meme from 2000, they’re not really on very firm ground here.

As is typical of the form, the sourcing varies from overzealous to non-existent: the Las Vegas Review-Journal is invoked to establish that there might just be some kind of a connection between the blog “Daily Kos” and the convention “Yearly Kos” — or, possibly, to establish the unthinkably controversial statement that dKos is “left-leaning” — whereas the statement

MOULITSAS’ NEW JOB: CO-CHAIR OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY
just sort of hangs there in space. At best, we get deft mischaracterization, whereby
“I know it’s not the most popular thing to say, but the French are right. You don’t win wars against terrorism on the battlefield.”
is summarized as:
Moulitsas On Fighting Terrorism: “The French Are Right.”
and the fun game — good for any high-traffic site of any political affiliation — in which the site’s proprietor is criticized for the ridiculous or offensive statements of their commenters or diarists. The rest of the time we’re left with their amusingly obstinate refusal to say “Democratic Party,” the assertion that two thirds of the “Democrat” leadership “fled to” Yearly Kos, and the off-message allegation that dKos is an “out-of-the-mainstream blog,” which is less defensible even than it is comprehensible. As far as the leftosphere is concerned, dKos built the mainstream — and that’s exactly the criticism the RNC would presumably wish to wield against blogs of the left.

Of course, the point is not that the RNC shouldn’t be trying to drum up bad publicity about Kos and his blog. The point is that they really should be doing a much, much better job than this. What’s more, if they really are intending this as the first shot in an ongoing campaign (see “Lieberman v. Lamont” halfway down the page, see also here) then it’s especially alarming. One assumes their next salvo will include an informative paragraph explaining what “web log” means.

Sock Puppet Theater

Published by Olly Ruff on July 26, 2006 in Blog Fights and Sock puppets. 2 Comments

It’s been a bumper week for post-Hiltzik sock puppetry. First a number of remarkably similar comments praising Glenn Greenwald on various blogs were discovered to have come from Glenn Greenwald’s IP address, and now this.

It’s hard to know exactly what to say about Jason Leopold, whose name was already a byword for unreliability and who now appears to be having some sort of very public breakdown. Seixon has a number of lengthy and fascinating posts on the matter, the highlight coming when Leopold threatens him with legal action and then posts obviously forged emails from Seixon at ThinkProgress. (Since removed, but documented here.) It’s entirely possible there are more fireworks to come.

After being caught, Michael Hiltzik lost his column and was suspended from the LA Times. Here, unless Leopold ends up facing criminal charges, there are unlikely to be any such ramifications. As far as Greenwald is concerned, it’d be hard to say the revelations of sock-puppetry have damaged him in any serious way: his defenders probably don’t care, and his detractors were already a lost cause. For Greenwald, multiple online defenders posting under different names from his IP address just count as more mau-mauing.

The Greenwald and Leopold affairs do share a relative artlessness; in fact, that the infractions in question are so obvious might be the most embarrassing thing about them. The Greenwald sock puppets all sounded exactly the same, all wrote exactly like Glenn Greenwald, and were all devoted to pointing out what a big deal Glenn Greenwald was. Even without checking IP addresses and analyzing timestamps, it’s impossible to read them without a few red flags being raised. Similarly, there are many reasons to believe that Jason Leopold fabricated portions of his emails from Seixon, but chief among them is that it’s simply not plausible that they would contain passages like:

You’re damn right it’s blackmail. Johnson must be stopped and you’re the target. I will take you down and I will have the National Review back me up.

Presumably, there are more cunning practitioners of the form out there. While watching the ongoing misadventures of Jason Leopold, we should spare a thought for the good sock puppets of the blogosphere: the ones we don’t notice.