Putting the blogosphere under a magnifying glass
I know this is nothing new, but I still got a kick out of this spam comment, which showed up in my Akismet spam filter earlier today:
The link goes to a parked domain pushing a number of presumably illegitimate travel agency websites. So, even if this spam comment does indeed originate from Russia, they can still move to France if that whole impeachment thing doesn’t work out.
P.S. Bush has twenty-three months left in office — isn’t it time to start thinking about impeaching somebody else?
Last Thursday at MyDD, Jonathan Singer compared registered voters’ attitudes toward President Bush, John McCain and the planned Iraq “surge” in the latest poll from Diageo/Hotline/Financial Dynamics [PDF]. His conclusion:
Independents are actually less likely to support escalation if it is framed as McCain doctrine than they are if it is framed as President Bush’s. They are the only partisan group to do so. Even Democrats are slightly more likely to support the increase in troops if it is listed as McCain’s plan than they are if it is listed as Bush’s. … In case you needed confirmation that the number of Independents supporting John McCain is decreasing rapidly, this may be it.
Well, maybe. I am sympathetic to the view that McCain will not command the kind of support from Indies that he enjoyed in 2000, but the margins are not wide enough to warrant such a conclusion, and the commenters seem to agree. But as we’ll see below, there is another story to be interpreted from this question, one which confounds my own expectations.
Below I have reproduced the charts Singer relied upon, with the sole difference being that I have Turnerized the table frames we’ll be discussing:
Do you favor or oppose President Bush’s proposed strategy of increasing the number of American troops in Iraq by as many as 20,000 troops over then next few months?
| Total | Republicans | Independents | Democrats | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly favor | 17 | 31 | 23 | 3 |
| Somewhat favor | 15 | 26 | 12 | 7 |
| Somewhat oppose | 9 | 10 | 12 | 7 |
| Strongly oppose | 53 | 25 | 49 | 79 |
| Neither favor nor oppose (not read) | 4 | 6 | 3 | 2 |
| Don’t know/refused (not read) | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Total | Republicans | Independents | Democrats | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly favor | 21 | 34 | 24 | 9 |
| Somewhat favor | 16 | 32 | 6 | 9 |
| Somewhat oppose | 10 | 9 | 15 | 7 |
| Strongly oppose | 44 | 16 | 34 | 70 |
| Neither favor nor oppose (not read) | 4 | 4 | 10 | 1 |
| Don’t know/refused (not read) | 6 | 6 | 10 | 4 |
If we combine the strongly/somewhats across the board and account for the opinion-deficient, we find Republicans supporting Bush on the issue 57-35-8, whereas Independents oppose his plan 35-61-4. For McCain, the same question yields 66-27-10 Republican support and 30-49-20 opposition from Independents. The numbers themselves should be taken with a grain of salt, but the patterns are notable.
First of all, the poll confirms others showing that the surge is unpopular, and even among Republicans support is lukewarm. Another conclusion from the above tables is relatively unsurprising: Republicans support Bush more than Independents do.
Putting aside Singer’s point for the moment, there is one more conclusion left unaddressed: Republicans support the surge when associated with McCain over Bush — and by a 9-point margin.
That’s good news for McCain, for whom the big question has been whether he can actually win the nomination; Independents are supposed to be his natural constituency, while he is weak with registered Republicans. But Republican angst about Iraq is on the rise, and the rank-and-file will be looking for the candidate most able to reassert leadership on the war — and on this issue, he actually bests the Republican commander-in-chief. That sure can’t be bad news. However, it would be nice to see how McCain stacks up against the other Republicans. Alas, Romney is the only one tested (fav/unfav only) and across the board, 49% of everyone has never heard of him.
Singer’s conclusion is correct on the face of it: Independents support Bush more than McCain, or more appropriately, oppose him less. But his readers correctly note that while Indies know they don’t like Bush on Iraq, a statistically significant 20% have no particular opinion on the issue vs-à-vis McCain. That could mean they’re on the fence now, but are open to being persuaded by McCain.
Or maybe that McCain Googlebomb just needs a little more time?
Ownership rights to impeachbush.com sold on eBay earlier today for a cool $25,200. The new owner, first-time buyer azmo-bargain, is anonymous. The seller was another eBay unknown, somebody named Jody Denise. He or she registered the domain in May 1999 but never did a thing with it.
This gives me an idea. With the 2008 presidential race stepping up a notch this past week, I wondered: What’s available to the aspiring impeachment activist or politically-aware cybersquatter?
To answer this question, I ran a series of impeachX.com domain searches at Network Solutions. For the purposes of this exercise, I went off the list of legitimate candidates from Politics1.com (sorry, St. Michael Jesus Archangel). In the case of Sen. Clinton, I assumed any impeachclinton domains would be related to her impeached husband. Past a certain point, there were several domains for whom no candidates had any associated registrations: .tv, .ws, .bz, .de, .co.uk and .eu. Mostly to save column space, I have Photoshopped them into oblivion.
I then organized the list in descending order from the candidates nobody expects to be impeaching to the most likely candidates for impeachment starting in 2009. Where candidates had an equal number but different domains registered, I defaulted to NetSol’s order of premium-ness. All other ties were decided by the alphabet.
Without further ado, here is the complete list:
Alas, this doesn’t tell us who registered these sites or when, to say nothing of why. Which campaigns were already wise to domain-hoarding? Who do the speculators like? Are any of these sites unrelated to 2008? Are any of them even active? I’ll try to answer those questions later this weekend.
The big news this morning is that President Bush has accepted U.N. Ambassador John Bolton’s letter of resignation. As many have pointed out, this development is no great surprise — as Martini Republic put it, “This time it’s not to spend more time with the family. It’s for want of votes.”
In one sense, the reaction from the blogosphere is predictable — many a conservative blogger is calling this a “sad day” for the U.S., while the left is saying “good riddance” — Firedoglake has even posted a YouTube video of the Peanuts kids dancing.
What exactly Bolton has done wrong while serving as ambassador is not terribly clear; the knock against him seems to remain his brusque manner and outspoken disdain for the institution, as it was before his recess appointment, which is an issue itself. But nor is it clear what Bolton might get done that another U.N. Ambassador could not — and I think anyone would be hard-pressed to single out anything meaningful he has accomplished. One pro-Bolton blogger tried to do just that, but if the list doesn’t put you to sleep, you may find some irony in a conservative citing U.N. resolutions as “accomplishments.”
The theme of futility can be found in on both sides of the political divide. Here’s American Footprints, arguing that this is why Bolton was the wrong pick in the first place:
Bolton has been consistently ineffective in terms of achieving desired objectives, and most parties (including his cohorts in the Bush administration) prefer to circumvent his involvement rather than invite to the table. From forging beneficial arrangements with Libya, to advancing the non-proliferation regime, it has proven easier to get things done without him around.
At A Blog For All, Lawhawk recognizes the fact that Bolton has changed little, but gives him credit just for trying:
The ambassador position is not meant to advance the UN position in the US, but vice versa. Bolton understood this, and this meant tackling the issues of rampant corruption in the Secretariat and pushing for action on Darfur and other human rights crises. It meant standing up for the rights of our allies, including Israel that came under constant attack from Islamic terrorist groups, and the UN General Assembly instead sought to limit Israel’s response. Bolton tried to deal with Darfur, and ran into roadblocks in the form of China and Russia. The same thing happened on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, which continues to proceed at full speed.
As the headline of this post indicates, the general atmosphere, at least on the right, is one of disappointed acceptance. Perhaps the most succinct is Allahpundit at Hot Air:
Not a surprise, really. Bad things happen when you lose your majority.
But there are a few on both sides who badly overstate the importance of this development. On the left, we have Middle Earth Journal calling Bolton a “national disaster for the country.” But the clear winner of this dubious contest is Macsmind, on the right, who writes:
Expected, but simply a foretaste of what danger the Democratic Party will be putting the country in in the next two years. … As for that ass-clown Rino Lincoln Chafee, if there were a death penalty for being a moral coward I would happily throw the switch.
Wow. If there was a death penalty for being a moral coward, the first order of business would have to be be removing cowardice from the list of capital crimes. Also, I’m not sure that “cowardice” best describes Chafee’s opposition to Bolton — is “obstinacy” not enough?
But back to the point — what danger does he refer to? I assume he means the Iranian nuclear program, and a nuclear Iran would indeed be a dangerous development. But there’s a lot more to it than John Bolton. Other than the fact that he currently occupies the ambassador position, why is he our last hope? Assuming Iran can be stopped at the United Nations, that is — isn’t the problem with the U.N. supposed to be that it’s ineffective?
It is possible that Bolton’s known dislike for the U.N. hampered his ability to work with other ambassadors and effect change, though the list of resolutions linked above indicates they can at least stand to be in the same room together. It’s also possible that U.N. incompetence and corruption simply cannot be overcome, or at least couldn’t in the last two years. As we try to advance our interests in the organization, so do fairweather friends such as China, Russia, France and non-friends such as Venezuela and, of course, Iran. Shouldn’t we expect a stalemate?
Whether Bolton was good for the country or bad for the country I don’t know enough to say. But one ambassador — let alone the Walrus himself — is not the difference between success (however that’s defined) and failure (which the U.N. seems quite good at).
Photo credit: This site.
Back in 2004, one of the founding members of the political blogosphere managed to blog his way out of the good graces of many he had inspired to take up Blogger accounts in the first place. That was Andrew Sullivan, and while he undoubtedly remains an A-lister, he’s probably already proved a kind of blogosphere peak traffic theory.
Another popular veteran blogger has been steering wider and wider away from his peers in the rightosphere, and unlike Sullivan, it’s one who has called himself a Republican. This is John Cole, the West Virginian Army vet and Pajamas Media signatory who writes Balloon Juice. His site is a rarity in the sense that the chief blogger identifies as right of center, but the readership (as demonstrated by its loyal commenters) leans decidedly to the left. For some time now, Cole has featured a co-blogger, Tim F., who is even more critical of the contemporary right than himself.
Both Cole and Sullivan have voiced greater concerns about the direction of the Iraq war and the war on terrorism, and about the Republican Party’s priorities regarding social issues than most mainstream conservative bloggers (and more than avowed non-conservative Glenn Reynolds, at least until the “pre-mortem” post). Unlike many of their peers, they’ve lost all respect for the Bush presidency and reclaimed/redefined conservatism enough to justify staying on the same side of the fence.
The very fact of their disagreement isn’t so much the issue — they could have drifted apart and largely ignored each other. Instead, the animosity really has to do with Sullivan and Cole coming around to openly fight with their erstwhile allies. These arguments look like personality conflicts, and they certainly are, but are also so contentious because an ideological fight underlies them.
The fights they pick are not without merit, though it’s sometimes hard to decide which side is thinking about it more clearly, if anyone — and so I’ll punt and just say “follow the links”: a non-definitive summary would note that Sullivan has clashed with Glenn Reynolds and with James Taranto and become an inside joke among numerous other bloggers. Cole is currently in the middle of a blog fight with Dan Riehl, just concluded one with Red State, and before long will probably go another round with Michelle Malkin.
As far as I can tell, it seems Cole usually aims to stand up for decency, Sullivan for his principles. This also seems to mean Sullivan-engaged arguments often revolve around himself — and hey, that’s just what Time is probably hoping for. To use a phrase more commonly associated with the leftosphere, they’re like concern trolls* in the wider conservative blogosphere.
Such blog fights can be either great fun or excruciatingly dull, depending on how much you have invested in the squabbling parties. And considering the war’s prominence in these splits, there will probably be more. Assuming Iraq gets worse before it gets better — that being one thing supporters and opponents of U.S. Iraq policy might agree on — we’ll see more bloggers reach a breaking point, lambasting their spherical allies for failing to understand what they do now, while the stalwarts kick them to the curb and renounce them as apostates.
It’s hard to say what this means for the 2008 White House scrum, currently still in training camp (pre-season begins with the first post-election early primary state straw poll). Both the left and right blogospheres will fracture, sometimes with acrimony and sometimes amicably, as they all back different candidates for president.
Since its post-2002 midterm formation, the leftosphere has been an anti-Bush monolith, and his eventual departure from Washington (and our eventual withdrawal from Iraq) will create new tensions for Democrats and the bloggers who favor them, along with the expected opportunities. If Democrats win the White House in ‘08, we could see the blogospheric equivalent of a geomagnetic reversal — on both sides, existing bloggers would realign, some veterans might lose readership, and newcomers could pick up big traffic.
It seems plausible that Sullivan and Cole could support a Republican for president alongside their erstwhile compatriots, but probably not until after the primary is decided. But I have to wonder, when Cole has been putting his “Republican Stupidity” category tag to much greater use lately compared with his “Democratic Stupidity” one, even though the latter category was once created 10 places before the former.
Of course, if a Republican takes the oath of office in January 2009, things certainly won’t remain static. 9/11 created the right-blogosphere and the Iraq war defined it, but as domestic (social and economic) policy has been inevitably regaining significance compared to foreign policy (which again, they don’t always agree on) things have gotten — and will continue to get — more interesting.
So, let’s settle for a hypothesis: The longer an individual participates in the blogosphere, the likelihood of a political shift dividing said blogger from his or her allies along new lines approaches one.
Note: Additional text and argumentation provided by OXR.
Yesterday afternoon, Michelle Malkin and Charles Johnson reported more or less simultaneously on a curious image (since removed) from the front page of the DNC website, purporting to show a U.S. soldier “hurting” because of “GOP broken promises.” To wit:
Only problem: The pictured soldier is actually Canadian, and Johnson’s readers quickly located more stills, providing conclusive evidence that a Democratic Photoshopper had doctored the image to remove a medal evidently believed to be a dead giveaway (but embarrassingly leaving another — the funny lapel pin).
This phenomenon is common enough now that such images have come to merit their own word: Fauxtoshop. In November 2005, MoveOn.org ran a TV spot conservative bloggers found politically outrageous, and which luckily happened to be an example of this burgeoning trend. Much like this latest imbroglio, the uniforms of foreign troops (this time, British) were modified to look more American:
In both cases, one wonders just how hard it would be to find a genuine photograph of members of the U.S. armed services looking vaguely aggrieved or lining up for a plateful of slop. The circumstances were slightly different in one of the earliest instances of blog-era political fauxtoshoppery, an image from the front page of the Bush-Cheney ‘04 official website, offending sections encircled by an unidentified Kossack:
Here, the idea was to make it look a lot cooler, as if this wall of troops just went on forever. Just as their counterparts on the right saw leftist perfidy in later fauxtoshop jobs, this manipulation was seized upon by the nascent netroots as another strike against A”W”OL.
But what should we make of all this? Be assured, neither side is above manipulating images of American troops for political expediency. These incidents say a lot less about comparative patriotism than than about the primacy of images in propaganda. Good visuals are hard to come by, and if a deceptive visual is more striking than a real image, unfortunately, that’s considered good enough.
P.S. There is also, of course, the recent case of photo manipulation by Lebanese Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj, also brought to light at Little Green Footballs:
While it falls beyond U.S. partisan considerations and does not involve soldiers per se, it is also probably the biggest Photoshop fraud uncovered by those pesky bloggers, and certainly deserves mention here.
P.P.S. Any journalism professor worth his whiskey makes sure freshman communications students hear about the distortive power of photographs. Already in the curriculum, I’m sure, is the recent case of an ambiguous photograph by Thomas Hoepker of young Brooklynites observing South Manhattan on Sept. 11, which has been the recent subject of debate at Slate:
Unlike the military-themed images above, this photo underwent no changes. When it’s hard enough to tell what undoctored images mean, one might hope that propagandists would use images in their proper contexts — but one might be hoping for an awful long time.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post’s Peter Baker sought out Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass’s response to Bush’s “public optimism” re: the Two Weeks and Counting War on the eastern end of the Meditteranean. Apparently Bush used the word “opportunity”; Haass retorts as only a former State Dept. official can:
“An opportunity? Lord, spare me. I don’t laugh a lot. That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what’s Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?”
Haas literally wrote the opportunity book on U.S. foreign policy. His title? “The Opportunity.”
Who Cares About the State of the Union?
Well, bloggers seem to at the moment.
For the most part, NPB isn’t much of a SOTU fan. I’ll watch it — with alcohol — read a little analysis here and there and then forget it tomorrow. I’m much more interested in stuff like this. That, at least, tells me something about the state of our union besides “strong.”
The truth is, I actually wanted to comment about the SOTU on a few SoapBlox blogs I was reading this morning. And I couldn’t, because the only account I have is on Daily Kos. And it’s not worth filling out the form, checking my e-mail and verifying the registration, all for a comment.
I totally understand why blogs need account registration — to fight the war on trolls and spammers. But can somebody please come up with a system where my Daily Kos login works on MyDD or RedState (need to tweak you wingers every now and then)? Blogger, Typepad and WordPress all have separate regimes, too. Why not create a portable comment ID that works across all systems?
I think a lot of political folks would participate more in the discussion if we didn’t have to sign up for an account on every damn site* we read.
Programmers, bloggers, entrepreneurs, get to work!
*I have 80 some blogs in my RSS reader.