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Author Archive for Olly Ruff

People Who Live In Glass Polling Stations

Published by Olly Ruff on July 24, 2006 in Internecine Battles and Netroots. 0 Comments

At the WaPo’s politics blog, Chris Cillizza profiles Matt Bennett of center-left think tank Third Way. (The interview also clears up the mystery of what happened to the jumpsuit Michael Dukakis was wearing in that tank in 1988. Access to this kind of souvenir is an underrated perk of a campaign aide’s job.)

Bennett’s assertions aside, Third Way may find itself at the heart of that debate [over a Dem presidential nominee] in 2008. Many within the party are painting the 2008 nomination as struggle between those who want the party to tack further to the ideological left (best represented by the liberal blogosphere) and those, like Third Way and the DLC, who believe only by appealing to the center can Democrats regain the White House.

MyDD’s Matt Stoller reacts to this, understandably enough, by going on the offensive. After disagreeing at length with the tactics of Americans for Gun Safety, a group Bennett helped found, he says this:

Bennett doesn’t care that he’s screwed up everything he’s ever touched. Read the interview; Bennett sees himself as being in the center of the 2008 Presidential debate on the Democratic side even though he’s pursuing the same strategies he’s always pursued, and has done nothing but lose.

Stoller’s post also points out, via Cillizza, that Bennett was part of Bill Clinton’s advance team in 1992. Such failures we should all have. It’s true that Bennett worked for Wesley Clark’s 2004 campaign, and Clark didn’t win. On the other hand, neither did Howard Dean. In fact, it’s really not in the interest of the left-netroots to introduce support for winning candidates as a measure of competence. In the meantime, the question of whether the Democrats’ recent electoral fortunes are due to triangulating corporate sell-outs or unhinged lefty extremists looks set to remain unresolved for a while.

Even Worse News Than The Quinnipiac Poll

Published by Olly Ruff on July 21, 2006 in Lamont v. Lieberman. 0 Comments

Nothing I’ve written has ever generated as much critical email from friends and acquaintances as my tortured, anti-anti-Lieberman column from a couple weeks ago.

So says The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, who goes on to say that he’s coming around to the anti-Lieberman position. Now, it’s easy to get the impression from the blogosphere that, at this point, Lieberman’s entire base of support consists of immediate family members and Marshall Wittman, but I still think it’s safe to say that if even TNR writers are wavering, that means trouble.

The real shock here, though, is that a single Lieberman column generated more critical email for Chait than his excellent Diary of a Dean-o-phobe blog. It is to be hoped that Chait will develop a similar burning antipathy towards one of the 2008 candidates - which one really doesn’t matter.

Already In Progress

Published by Olly Ruff on July 20, 2006 in Comment Sections and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

  • Welcome, Instapundit readers! Do check back in next week, as well, when Blog P.I. will be back under the control of its regular proprietor.

  • Wendy McElroy of iFeminists.com tackles the ballad of Deb Frisch for Fox News, as discussed here and here.

  • If you try to comment and it doesn’t seem to be showing up, rest assured that your comment has not been misappropriated, and will be approved as soon as we see it.

  • Speaking of which, the question of open comments versus registered comments or no comments at all is an interesting one. Personally, I tend to prefer open comment sections, if only because they pave the way for situations like this.

    • Ben Shapiro’s Art Of War

    Published by Olly Ruff on July 19, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

    Comment-mining blogs on the right (or left) to find people saying crazy things and then holding them up as paradigmatic of their side is a fun thing to do, and while taking issue with him I’d be remiss not to note that Glenn Greenwald’s blog is a valuable resource for things like this extraordinary Ben Shapiro column.

    Last I paid attention to Shapiro, he was still in his comfort zone: he didn’t get along with his professors at UCLA, and his fellow young adults weren’t living up to his exacting moral standards:

    I am a member of a lost generation. We have lost our values. We have lost our faith. And we have lost ourselves… The ‘live and let live’ societal model is a recipe for societal disaster.

    Shapiro is given to making this kind of statement, and he’s provided a great deal of sport for bloggers as a result. (Not just lefty bloggers, either - see also this review by Radley Balko, from which I pulled that overwrought quote.) However, he seems undaunted, and has now turned his attention to the history of armed conflict and hoisted the “sedition!” flag:

    Under the Espionage Act of 1917, opponents of World War I were routinely prosecuted, and the Supreme Court routinely upheld their convictions. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rightly wrote, “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” The Allies won World War I. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans, as well as allowing the prosecution and/or deportation of those who opposed the war. The Allies won World War II. During the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the free speech rights of war opponents, whether those opponents distributed leaflets depicting the rape of the Statue of Liberty or wore jackets emblazoned with the slogan “F— the Draft.” America lost the Vietnam War.

    Yes, the jackets were the last straw. What’s really impressive about this, though, is the Malkinesque dotted line connecting the internment of Japanese-Americans and Allied victory in WWII. By Shapiro’s logic, one supposes that the Nazis’ own acts, being so much more heinous than the Korematsu decision, should have given them a substantial tactical advantage of some kind. (Also, read in this light, he seems to be inadvertently calling for the suspension of habeas corpus.)

    Of course, it’s in Shapiro’s interest to say ridiculous things to get a reaction, and it’s in the interest of the left-hand side of his audience to provide him with the outrage he’s looking for. This is a symbiotic relationship with which everyone seems to be happy - however, its significance is unlikely to be as great as any of the participants would wish it to be.

    Reasons Left Unstated

    Published by Olly Ruff on July 19, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

    Eric Alterman is very properly disturbed by virulently anti-Semitic remarks made by the Speaker of the Iraqi parliament, snarking:

    Here are your tax dollars at work.

    This is a good catch, and a definite step forward from last week:

    A lot of Jewish organizations get their funding - and a lot of Jews their personal identities - from hyping anti-Semitism in Europe in general and France in particular… As far as I can tell, any increase in anti-Semitism in Western Europe is attributable to the influx of young Arabs and they have reasons - whether you or I like or not - to hate Jews that have nothing whatever to do with traditional European anti-Semitism.

    Yikes. Presumably Alterman would not react favorably to someone countering his more recent post with the assertion that there are “reasons - whether you or I like or not” for the guy he’s quoting to hate Jews.

    All The President’s Glenn?

    Published by Olly Ruff on July 19, 2006 in Netroots. 29 Comments

    This post by Glenn Greenwald continues his mission to (one the one hand) point out people on the right saying stupid things and (on the other) attempt to use them to discredit the rightosphere altogether. It’s a fun game, anyone can play, and at his current rate Greenwald seems set to become some sort of Bizarro David Horowitz:

    As its leading bloggers vividly illustrate, pro-Bush “conservatism” is a highly authoritarian movement which seeks to vest unlimited and unrestrained power in their Leader, views garden-variety political dissent as blasphemy and treason, and glorifies violence as a justifiable tool to achieve their glorious political ends. The standard language and argumentation of these pro-Bush bloggers reflect those attributes on a daily basis…

    And so forth. Not for the first time, his primary target here is Glenn Reynolds: the interesting question, as far as I’m concerned, is whether it’s in the best interests of the leftosphere to treat Reynolds as a demented right-winger. (Regardless of how much of a stretch it may be to do so. Greenwald provides a dozen or so links to putatively sinister Instapundit posts, of which this is a fairly typical, and baffling, example.)

    The most effective political blogs of both left and right are community sites, group ventures where funding is solicited and platforms are floated. Compared to them, Instapundit is from another era: one man, some links, relatively little chit-chat. He’s not marshalling the troops: at most, he’s suggesting things for them to read. In terms of personal politics, he’s no fire-breathing righty: he’s pro-gay-marriage, against overturning Roe v. Wade, and at odds with the Republican base on a number of other hot-button issues. Moreover, he’s no Republican loyalist, having done various things like work on Al Gore’s 1988 campaign, vote for Dukakis in that year and Harry Browne in 2000, etc. If Grover Norquist was working for the Democrats, he’d view someone with this many areas of overlap as a blue-chip recruit, not an apostate. It’s interesting that so many prominent sites in the leftosphere - which has become, on the whole, much more pragmatic over the last couple of years thanks to the growth of sites like dKos and MyDD - seem to consider him a rock-solid R vote.

    Now, it’s possible that Reynolds qua Reynolds is of greater long-term value to the center-left as a Goldstein figure (in both the 1984 and Protein Wisdom senses) to be periodically burned in effigy and referred to as “Instacracker.” (Or, my personal favorite, “professor of Creationism at Wayback University.”) It’s also possible that support for the Iraq war is the kind of litmus test that can’t be gotten around. And, certainly, not everyone finds his posts interesting. But if you’re a Democrat, and the idea is to actually win in 2008, people like Glenn Reynolds have got to be worth thinking about. (If the idea is just to be able to keep sneering at the “Wayback University” law faculty, well, that’s fine too.)

    All Your Base Are Inflamed By Us

    Published by Olly Ruff on July 18, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

    Yesterday’s Blogometer covered the state of play as regards this seeming faux pas on the part of Hillary Clinton:

    We do things that are controversial. We do things that try to inflame their base.

    Quote from this story. Depending on the context, this could mean any number of things, but the real question was whether the “we” referred to Democrats, the Republican-controlled Senate, or (feasibly) the Clintons. Peter Daou, HRC’s recently employed blog advisor, gets credit for corralling the story quickly and to the left-netroots’ satisfaction.

    However, as of this morning, there is still some dispute over at RedState. It’s always worth keeping an eye on a situation in which liberals may be called upon to attack an NYT story, and conservatives to defend it.

    That’s Not What “Red State” Means

    Published by Olly Ruff on July 18, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

    As the years go by, the stories of national shame that crop up whenever George Bush travels outside the US are becoming a little fatigued. Even when he obligingly curses during a conversation with Tony Blair and it gets caught on tape, the old magic just isn’t there. Says Arianna Huffington, in this instance:

    Has there ever been a more feeble statement by a U.S. president than “See, the irony is what they really need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over”?

    If this is now considered feeble, then we’re going to need a new word for most of the foreign policy statements that occur when the microphones are supposed to be on, as well as for much of Huffington’s own website. No, we need a new angle on these stories. We need energy and vigor. We need, in short, an argument that Bush’s visit to Germany bears the sinister hallmarks of Communism.

    For my money, the best part is the suggestive juxtaposition of Bush pecking Angela Merkel on the cheek with Gorbachev doing the same to Erich Honecker. (Although, in fairness to Bush, not on the same cheek.) The diarist goes on to darkly warn us that:

    Honecker resigned in a coup less than two weeks later. The Berlin Wall was opened on November 9th, 1989, and the two German states were re-unified on October 3rd, 1990. After its 40th birthday, East Germany did not survive another year.

    Fantastic. (I will stipulate, however, that if Merkel’s political career does implode within the next two weeks I owe this diarist an apology.)

    How Many Divisons Has Bill Keller?

    Published by Olly Ruff on July 17, 2006 in Blogs vs. MSM and MSM. 0 Comments

    Some controversy over the New York Times publishing photographs of Muqtada al-Sadr’s supporters in Iraq, presumably taken by someone who had gotten close enough to, in principle, kill them instead. Actually, I’m not sure if “controversy” is the word. Is it controversial these days to assert that the NYT sides with terrorists? It must have been so, at one point in the dim past, but now it’s more or less a truism. (Or at least a very resilient meme.)

    Part of the objection this time seems to be to NYT Assistant Managing Editor for Photography Michele McNally using the term “incredible courage” to describe a person whose job involves running around a war zone, attempting to take pictures of the war while it is happening. Fair enough. But mostly this is a prime example of the good-natured visceral attacks the NYT now receives on an almost-daily basis, and that have been going on long enough to become a sort of rhetorical five-finger exercise for righty bloggers. Beginning with a disagreement over the paper’s editorial direction, it only takes a hop and a skip to end up speculating along these lines:

    If NYT editors had learned of the 9/11 plot beforehand, would they have warned the government? Or would they have set up videocameras to get the best possible shot of the first plane hitting the tower? An outrageous question? I think not. In light of this photograph, it seems like a perfectly sensible question.

    It’s hard to know exactly how to respond to that, except to say that this is a question that seems quite a considerable distance away from “perfectly sensible.” However, in the blogs-versus-MSM narrative, the one thing that’s better than calling the Big Media dinosaurs a bunch of bought-out corporate mouthpieces is accusing them of high treason.

    Media Matters: Enough Is Enough, Again

    Published by Olly Ruff on July 17, 2006 in Blogs vs. MSM and Netroots. 0 Comments

    The folks at Media Matters are not happy about media treatment of lefty bloggers:

    Liberal bloggers get dismissed as crazy and angry, often by reporters who don’t bother to offer a single example to back up their sneering insults… Meanwhile, vitriol, hate, and even threats of physical violence by conservative bloggers draw comparatively little attention.

    In a way, having Joe Klein complain about “all the left-wing screeching” is a tribute - it’s a sign they’re being taken seriously. For better or worse, the left-netroots are perceived as a political entity unto themselves in a way that the right-netroots are not - there are “netroots candidates,” there are entertaning internecine squabbles, there are wonderful spectacles like CT-SEN ‘06. The rightosphere has a much less adversarial relationship with its own side of the political establishment. (Well, there’s Porkbusters, I suppose.) If the folks at (say) the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler took a break from providing Media Matters with febrile quotes and began aggressively taking sides in Republican primaries, they’d probably attract a lot more negative attention too.

    As for the “vitriol, hate, and threats of physical violence,” there are some puzzling choices here. Along with a couple of Rottweiler posts (fair enough) and some people publishing home addresses of NYT employees, we find this Jane Galt post from 2003, and this 2002 Instapundit offering. As for what they’re doing on this list, your guess is as good as mine.

    Meanwhile, at time of writing, 882 people have appended their names to a petition urging “the media” to cease and desist from publishing/broadcasting pundits they don’t like. Onward to victory! (Although if this anguished plea does convince Universal Press Syndicate to drop Ann Coulter, that probably doesn’t bode well for Ted Rall.)