Putting the blogosphere under a magnifying glass
If it turns out that a couple of prominent Democratic bloggers are injured or worse during a car accident in Connecticut this week, well, we can’t say we weren’t warned:
Braking Blue (aldon) (A little campaign levity during Lamont Week.) I was just on the phone with Tim Tagaris who cursed a blue streak as he slammed on the brakes, cut off again by Matt Stoller as they raced down to the big rally in Greenwich. Posted at 08/04/2006 04:53:53 PM EST - #
Following up on the Chronicle of Higher Education symposium Blog P.I. summarized on Saturday, participating blog Sivacracy (but not participating blogger Siva Vaidhyanathan) zings fellow participanting blog Instapundit good on the lacking substance of many an Insta-post. It doesn’t qualify as “shortering,” but it is pithy enough to be unsummarizable. Zingee Glenn Reynolds is actually on vacation this week, so the post’s author, Univ. of SC prof Ann Bartow, will actually see a rising word-to-link count thanks to his guest bloggers over the next few days. Which may only reinforce her point.
In Reynolds’ defense, dashed-off posts may be the unavoidable result of “instant punditry.” Still, “SURELY THE END TIMES ARE UPON US: Ana Marie Cox is now Time.com’s Washington Editor” hardly qualifies as “punditry.” And if Reynolds’ law school dean truly thinks his blog counts as “scholarship,” let alone legal scholarship, the academy might have bigger problems than mere blogging.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Note: As previously mentioned, when I go international next week, my old friend and onetime colleague Olly Ruff will be taking over this space, live from Down Under. While he gets used to the prospect of posting for an audience on the other side of the world, and as I get ready to depart, he’ll be filing a few guest posts. Here’s one:
There’s still a sense that a blog-fight hasn’t really made the big time until it hits the paper-based media, and the saga of Deb Frisch, former Psychology adjunct at the University of Arizona, has now crossed that Rubicon. As is now a matter of record, Frisch enthusiastically trolled the oft-trolled comments of Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom, and eventually escalated matters to the point that she was making tasteless comments about Goldstein’s two-year-old son. Frisch abruptly announced her resignation, and the story kept going from there.
Although most lefty observers pointed out that they had never heard of Frisch, she didn’t materialize from thin air, she was not a right-wing stooge, and her antics chez Goldstein were not particularly unusual by her own bizarre standards. (Try this Crooked Timber thread, for instance.) Certainly, everyone who is not crazy can agree that Frisch’s comments were reprehensible. On the other hand, they could not be reasonably interpreted as a threat (to his credit, Goldstein pointed this out himself) and anyone who wastes their lives in comment sections has seen much worse. So how did things progress to the point where Deb Frisch is in the newspaper?
Continue reading ‘L’Affaire GoldFrisch: Part I’
Welcome friends, associates, colleagues, indexing spiders and accidental tourists. This is Blog P.I.
Anyone actually reading this post today is probably well enough aware of my former web column on the subject of political blogs. For them, this new site will probably be recognizable. (As for the rest of you, type a little more carefully next time.)
Here at Blog P.I., I won’t attempt a comprehensive rundown of all the biggest stories in the political web, as I did for nearly a year. Rather, I’ll focus on the most interesting controversies, the most controversial interests, and dig a bit further into developing stories. Blog P.I. will be a meta-blog much like my last gig, but chances are I won’t be a pure observer, if I ever was. Blog P.I. will move stories forward whenever possible.
You’ll notice that the site is still technically in “beta,” which is to some extent a clever way of saying we’re not really ready to go, and to some extent exactly how a blog should be launched. The blogroll at left will grow, the layout will be customized, and I’ll figure out exactly what goes on around here. This first week especially, I’ll be throwing things against the blog and seeing what sticks, so please, pardon me if I make a bit of a mess.
Then the week after I have a previously scheduled engagement in Europe, so an old friend and fellow blog-watcher will be here to water the plants and pick up the mail. By which I mean to say, week two of Blog P.I. is all his. I am not familiar with any other blog that has launched one week and brought in a guest-blogger the second, so this will be unusual to say the least. Then again, if Blog P.I. is unusual, at least it won’t be like every other blog about blogs (and they are legion).
So there you have it. After some weeks of planning and procrastination, Blog P.I. is on the case. Whether this means car chases and shootouts or blurry pictures of your wife getting out of a strange man’s car, I don’t rightly know. Either way, we’ll have some fun.
P.S. — Unless I’m bumped, I should be on The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly at 1:06 p.m. EDT. I bet you can guess what the general subject will be.
“All Politics is National”
Good line. Wish I’d said it first, but Google tells me I’m at least 115 results too late. Bill Clinton might’ve said it, too. However, only a few seem to have intended it as I did. One is the now abandoned godofthemachine.com, which put it succinctly:
I didn’t invent it, but maybe I can still popularize it. I’ll try to remember to use that where it applies — a lot of places, I’d think. Consider your help solicited.
The line comes from a post dated 7/16/03, titled “The Immutable Laws of Blog Comments.” It holds up well enough that I’ve included the full text, after the jump.
Continue reading ‘“All Politics is National”’