"Yep. [The press corps] 'neared rebellion' not over OLC memos or drone strikes or FOIA tardiness or leak prosecutions..."

"... but over their inability to ask Obama questions — tough ones! penetrating ones!—before and after he hit the links. Sheesh."

"Mitt Romney Is Now Officially the Most Hated Man in America."

Kevin Drum.

"Liberals, you should rein in the triumphalism."

Says the liberal Kevin Drum:

Obama won a narrow 51-49 percent victory and the composition of Congress changed only slightly. This was not a historic vindication of liberalism, and it doesn't mean that we can suddenly decide that demography will sweep us to victory for the next couple of decades. The plain truth is that although an increasing number of voters are turned off by what Republicans represent, that doesn't mean they've become lefty converts. A lot of them are still pretty nervous about a big part of our agenda, and we have a lot of work ahead to get them more solidly on our side. Also: No matter how much you hate to hear it, long-term deficit reduction and entitlement reform really are pretty important. Just because conservatives abuse the point doesn't mean there isn't something to it.

"Obama's Ground Game Advantage May Not Be As Big As It Looks."

Says Kevin Drum (at Mother Jones), displaying a chart that's been "making the rounds."

Democrats tend to rely on paid, professional operations, while Republicans rely more on volunteer efforts, largely from evangelical churches. This is something that actually works in the Republicans' favor, since volunteer efforts from friends and neighbors tend to be more effective at switching votes than professional phone banks....

"If you put a gun to their head and they had to choose between one or the other..."

"... they'd pay the higher taxes without a peep. That's because, on the level of raw power, they know how the world works."

That's Kevin Drum in Mother Jones on January 22, providing an egregious example of the left using violent gun imagery to make a political point, even after the Tucson massacre and all those calls for new civility. I found that via Matt Yglesias, who quotes Drum and even puts the gun-to-the-head business in boldface but takes absolutely zero note of the extremely violent rhetoric.

"The fifth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa."

Wrote Saul Alinsky in "Rules for Radicals." I went searching for that rule when I read the way Kevin Drum and Mark Schmitt pushed back against Spencer Ackerman. But Alinsky was at least contemplating the role of ethics as he subordinated means to ends:

Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis — will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means. But if one lacks the luxury of a choice and is possessed of only one means, then the ethical question will never arise; automatically the lone means becomes endowed with moral spirit.

(Page 32.)

We don't have the full text of what Drum and Schmitt wrote. But in The Daily Caller quotes, they only ask what will work best. They don't even throw in as a makeweight argument that it would be more ethical to refrain from calling their opponents racists.

***

Another distinction is that Alinsky was talking about rules for political activists, not journalists. Even as means are subordinated to ends, journalism is subordinated to political activism.

How far were Journolisters willing to go to help Obama win the election?

Jonathan Strong, at the Daily Caller, quotes from that email list known as the Journolist:

Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC..."

Kill ABC because in an ABC News debate, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos had pressed Obama with questions about Wright.

"...and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

Interesting double use of the word "kill." We need to kill ABC before ABC kills the discourse.

“We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”

Throw chairs now. Kill. Rather violent ideation there. Imagine if a tea partier had used such language. Look at what Spencer Ackerman wrote:

"I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

"And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

Smash... through a plate-glass window... snapshot of the bleeding mess... live in a state of constant fear...

Ackerman got some pushback, but only, it seems, because his strategy appeared ineffective. Mark Schmitt thought it would be bad to make the campaign "all about character" (as opposed to substance), and Kevin Drum said that it would be counterproductive because "the Obama brand" was about being above it all.

The Daily Caller may be picking the juiciest bits from the prize archive it has acquired. I would like access to the whole set of documents so that I can see for myself. The liberal/lefty journalists were eager to help their side, and perhaps conservative journalists do the same for their side. Is Strong smashing Ackerman's head through a plate glass window — rhetorically! — or is this an admirable study of ethics in journalism?

What would be different about the health care debate today if Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, had become President?

Kevin Drum says:

Yesterday Paul Krugman reminded us that preferring Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton because you wanted to avoid the Clinton psychodrama of the 90s was always a vain hope. Back in early 2008 he wrote, "Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false." Ezra Klein, chatting online about town hall hysteria, added, "This is how the conservative movement organizes against major pieces of liberal legislation. It's not about a particular moment or leader."

This is unquestionably true, but I'd just like to add one thing. If Hillary Clinton had won last year's Democratic primary and gone on to become president, and then this year's town hall meeting had turned into insane gatherings of lunatics yelling about death panels, every single pundit in Washington — Every. Single. One. — would be blaming it on her. Their unanimous take would be: Democrats knew that she was a divisive figure and chose to put her in the White House anyway. It's hardly any wonder that conservatives have gone nuts, is it?

That narrative, as we now know, would have been 100% wrong. But that would have been the narrative anyway. Caveat lector.

This is all very interesting, but I'd just like to add one thing. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama presented himself as someone who could bring us into a new era of transcendence over partisan differences. There would be Hope and Change. Obama believed — and a lot of us believed — that he was a calm, reassuring figure whom we could all love and trust.

Hillary would have known better. She'd been through it all before. She wouldn't have thought she could could ease you and cool you and cease the pain*. She wouldn't have blithely assumed Americans would quietly accept the vast, complex restructuring of health care that the congressional Democrats dumped on us. Obama naively thought that he was enough, and the more-liberal-than-America Democrats imagined they could get by on the magic of our admiration for the charming new President, who would look even lovelier as he amassed glittering accomplishments. Wouldn't he be wonderful? Wouldn't America be wonderful to have elected such a fine man President?

He and they got all puffed up. I don't think Hillary would have let that happen. He was Hope. She was Experience. Experience would have been different.

"I used to swear a lot. I like swearing, and I love reading people who do it well."

Oh, lord — is that swearing? — I'm going with a second Kevin Drum quote this morning — and a second post traced to the netroots convention. But anyway, this is a different subject: The use of rough language among friends and in blogging that used to be written in the style of talking to your friends but is now written with the intent to reach the whole political world, which isn't going to listen properly if you talk like that. Was the bad language ever good, and if it was, what have we lost? We do still want blogging to sound like the way we'd talk to friends, don't we?

In the nowhere of the blogosphere....

... I'm trying to put on a necklace and to fend off a tsunami of possibly doughy Clinton sycophants.

ADDED: Not only did I typo "sycophants" as "syncophants," but the video is entirely out of sync! I'll see if I can fix it. Damn! [BUT: I think I know how.]... FIXED!

IN THE COMMENTS: I like what John Stodder says here. (And he may be interested to know what lawprof Jack Balkin said here, which I used to have up in the banner.)

Could Tim Russert please be more boring?

Matt Yglesias is outraged — just outraged — at Tim Russert. How dare that man drive politicians into a corner with tough questions instead of giving them space to inform us.

According to Yglesias, questions with the goal of providing information about the candidates' policies would — take global warming for example — show how fine the Democrats are and trap only Republicans:

And as it happens, the plans released by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards are all based on good science and good economics. So asking them questions aimed at elucidating their plans shouldn't lead to any embarrassing incidents....

John McCain, by contrast, might or might not end up embarrassed by serious questions about his plan... His Republican counterparts, by contrast, would almost certainly wind up embarrassed by serious questions about their views of climate change since their policies are badly at odds with reality.

Come on, Russert! Can't you set things up to embarrass Republicans and not Democrats? But clear away Yglesias's laughable bias and his point is that candidates should be given room to lecture us about their policies. Or not us... because I wouldn't watch such a boring TV show... but somebody... or maybe nobody...

[Russert] attracts a circle of admirers who share his perverse and unethical lack of concern for whether or not his work helps produce an informed public, gobs of less-prominent television journalists seek to emulate his lack of concern with informing the public, print journalists eagerly court opportunities to appear on the non-informative shows hosted by Russert and his emulators, and down the rabbit hole we go.

It's unethical to confront political candidates with the contradictions in their own statements and with pointed criticisms from their opponents? It's perverse? Russert's a sadist, don't you know, because he won't let our politicians get comfortable.

IN THE COMMENTS: Zeb Quinn writes: "It was quite clear in the immediate aftermath of the last debate that the Clintonistas had their long knives out for Russert. This more of that." Yes, I think that's right. Is Yglesias a Clinton sycophant? I notice a lot of bloggers nodding their heads a little too eagerly at the rather flabby Yglesipost. Including Kevin Drum, whom I'd already suspected was a Clinton sycophant.

Is Kevin Drum a Clinton sycophant?

"Matt Yglesias adds his voice to the tsunami of blogospheric support for a VAT to pay for universal healthcare...." The blogosphere is a strange place, isn't it? Odd little people, echoing off each other...

I just read that over at Kevin Drum's blog, which I was scanning to try to figure out his position on Hillary Clinton. Actually, he isn't such a "little" guy: I learned that he has a BMI of 28. I know, maybe he's very muscular, but I'm guessing doughy. I think if you know 2 facts, BMI of 28 + blogger, you can assume doughy. For the sake of argument. And I'm here for an argument.

Anyway, I didn't look around long enough to tell if he writes in support of Hillary Clinton, which is something I wanted to do because he identified an anti-Clinton post of mine as a nominee for what he called — with pedestrian humor — "the Golden Wingnut Award." I understand that I ruffled some feathers with that harshly satirical post that took aim at Bill Clinton and a feminist who festoons her blog with images of breasts. You can hate that post all you want, but there's nothing right wing about it. If it's any wing, it's left.

So I got to thinking that Drum must be one of those politicos who's carrying water for HC.

I'm glad to see there's some discussion in the comments over there about whether I'm a right winger. But I'm not seeing anything about the fact that the post in question contained absolutely nothing right wing. It was just anti-Clinton.

So is Drum a Clinton sycophant? I found this over there:

I'm not a big fan of individual mandates and private insurance companies, but in the spirit of Atrios's advice to "stop wanking," I also understand that my preferences just aren't on the table right now. And I have to say that I agree with Ezra: although the three leading Democratic presidential candidates have proposed healthcare plans that are similar in a lot of ways, Hillary's strikes me as not just substantively as good as any of them (and better in some ways), but also the politically savviest and most practical of the lot. Given her experience in 1994 (she knows what won't work) combined with the legislative canniness she seems to have developed in the Senate (she know what will work), that's not too surprising.

In any case, it's a good plan. Edwards and Obama are going to have a very hard time making criticisms that stick. Obama, in particular, suffers because his plan is, if anything, a bit less ambitious than Hillary's even though he's supposed to be the candidate with fresh new ideas. For now, anyway, I think Hillary has outflanked him.

Wanking and outflanking. If I had time, I'd write a poem.

But I don't have time. Not to write a poem and not to solve the mystery of whether Drum is on my case in service to the Clintons.

Just a hypothesis.

ADDED: I just searched for all my old posts with the name "Kevin Drum" so I could add a "Kevin Drum" tag, and I see that the very first time I ever mentioned his name on this blog was noting that he'd just called me a wingnut. Let's take a closer look at my first encounter with Kevin Drum, detector of wingnuts. My post noted that the NYT had changed a headline from "Amid Attacks, a Party Atmosphere on Baghdad's Closed Streets" to "Insurgent Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Kill at Least 24" on a story about the large voter turnout in Iraq's first election.

Blasting me as a "wingnut" for this post, Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly delivers an irrelevant lecture about how newspaper websites work. He fails to see the point, which is awfully clear in my post, that the changing headlines were for the very same article.... There are 54 comments on Drum's post at the moment, and, though I haven't read them all, most of them seem to be from people who are just accepting Drum's mistaken point about my post. There is at least one commenter in there who keeps trying to point out the mistake, but the passion for denouncing the optimism of imagined crazy right wing bloggers is so strong that it overwhelms the interest in the facts. And the irony is that Drum's main point is that those who are taking an optimistic view don't respect the truth. It would be bad if I were disrespecting the truth out of optimism, of course. But Drum is disrespecting the truth out of an aversion to optimism, which is really quite sad.

If you go over there, you might want to leave a comment in my defense. And if you're into that, leave a comment for me over here too. I'm surprised at the way some lefty blogs seem to think they are making a good point by quoting something and saying the person who wrote it is stupid or crazy, even as they are plainly misreading the very thing they quote.

So that's how I became a "wingnut" in the wingnut-detecting mind of Kevin Drum.

I fought back:

That original headline represented the article fairly. I praised the Times's headlines earlier that day as "a subtle mix of positive and negative," giving us "a sense of the importance of what is happening [without allowing] the bad to overshadow the good." A number of prominent bloggers, linking to the Filkins-Burns article, drew special attention to the "party atmosphere" language in the headline. Later in the day, I noticed that the headline had been changed to "Insurgent Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Kill at Least 24," which completely failed to convey the gist of the article, the text of which had not changed. (The headline became even more negative later: "Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Reportedly Kill Several Dozen.") I thought the headline change was worth blogging, along with my observation that it was "pathetic" -- pathetic to pick out the negative from an article full of positive.

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly somehow saw fit to launch into an attack, calling me a "wingnut" and delivering an irrelevant lecture about how newspaper headlines are written and websites updated. You certainly can't tell from reading his garbled post that I was writing about changing the headline on the same article and changing it to something that did not fit the article. I've exchanged some emails with Drum, who has an elaborate justification for putting an inappropriate headline on one article so that the whole mix of headlines on the main page that day would not be excessively positive. There was violence in Iraq, the theory goes, so one of the headlines needed to refer to violence, and since there was some reference to violence in the Filkins-Burns article, that was a good place to put the negative headline. I think that may be the best thing that might be said in defense of the Times, though I still have a problem with it. But I have much more of a problem with Drum, who — despite his lecture about how websites can be frequently updated — has not seen fit to update his post and make it clear that he misrepresented my post. Frankly, he owes me a public apology, on his website, for calling me a wingnut and for ridiculing me based on his own misreading (or deliberate misrepresentation).

What a sleaze! I'd forgotten all that. Thank Blogger for the archive for preserving a grudge I'm just not cantankerous enough to have carried on my own. And shame on Kevin Drum. I want 2 apologies now.

"A guy like Giuliani is polarizing because he actively chooses to be. It's part of his persona. He wants people to hate him."

"Hillary, by contrast, is polarizing not because she wants to be, but because the right-wing attack machine made her that way. She's 'polarizing' only because a certain deranged slice of conservative nutjobs detest her."

Writes Kevin Drum — responding to Andrew Sullivan, who's putting down both Rudy and Hillary for being "polarizing." Drum thinks that Sullivan is running them down because he doesn't like either Rudy or Hillary, and Drum un-runs-down Hillary. So either Hillary is not polarizing or Kevin Drum — I'm following Drum-style analysis — like Hillary.

"This more or less legalizes the N.S.A. program."

Law signed.

Much outcry.

Kevin Drum states the objection well:

All they have to do is claim that the real target is the foreigner and that a "significant purpose" of the eavesdropping is related to intelligence gathering. Not terrorism, mind you, just intelligence generically. What's more, they don't even have to go to the minimal trouble of making that claim to a court. They can just make it and approve it themselves.

So that's that. The government is now legally allowed to monitor all your calls overseas with only the most minimal oversight. But don't worry. I'm sure they'll never misuse this power. They never have before, have they?

But everyone who voted for the law -- including many Democrats -- understood this and saw greater weight on the other side of the argument. Why?

ADDED: Here's some well-worded bloggage:

“Do Nothing”, “New Democratic Congress” Finally Does “Something”…

And, thanks for NOTHING…

JERKS.

That's from Gun-Toting Liberal, who goes on to riff about Congress's 3% approval rating on its handling of the war.

"Since some indeterminable hour between the final dousing of the pyre at The World Trade Center...."

"... and the breaking of what Sen. Barack Obama has aptly termed '9/11 fever,' it has been profoundly and disturbingly evident that we are at the center of one of history’s great ironies."

Does anyone serve up more horrendously muddled verbiage than Keith Olbermann? I mean if something is "profoundly and disturbingly evident" why is the hour "indeterminable"? Something is either clear or it's not. And must those dreadful metaphors also be mixed? A pyre and a fever are two different kinds of burning, so it's not clever to put them together, and the burning buildings of 9/11 are not an appropriate place to demonstrate cleverness, if in fact you were capable of it.

But, you say you've identified "one of history's great ironies"? (By the way, what are the great ironies of history? I've never seen that top 10 list.)

Only in this America of the early 21st century could it be true that the man who was president during the worst attack on our nation and the man who was the mayor of the city in which that attack principally unfolded would not only be absolved of any and all blame for the unreadiness of their own governments, but, moreover, would thereafter be branded heroes of those attacks.

Excuse me a minute. I just want to diagram that sentence. Or, class, the assignment is to rewrite that in English.

Oh, blah, I can't continue to reprint this blather. Let me summarize. He quotes Giuliani saying that America will be safer with a Republican President because the Democrats will take us into a defensive policy in the war on terror and that "we will have more losses and it will go on longer." Translating Rudy's pithy remarks, Olbermann manages to avoid verbosity. What Giuliani is really saying -- don't you know? -- is: "vote Democratic and die."

Olbermann's portentous zinger: "How ... dare ... you, sir?"

What I'd like to see is not all this ridiculous gasping about who is and who isn't a monster but a serious discussion about whether the presidential campaign is offering us a choice between an offensive and a defensive response to terrorism and, if it is, which we ought to prefer. But it seems we've all already formed emotional attachments to one side or the other. Or else we've tuned out politics for now. Whatever, I recommend tuning out Olbermann. What a gasbag.

ADDED: Kevin Drum has a better response to Giuliani's remarks and the lame comebacks from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:

Neither one of them took the chance to do what Rudy did: explain in a few short sentences why the country would be safer with a Democrat in the Oval Office. Is it really that hard? Giuliani's position is clear: more war, more domestic surveillance, more torture, and fewer civil liberties. And while it's true that the liberal position on making America secure is a little more complicated than the schoolyard version of foreign affairs beloved of Bush-era Republicans, it's not that complicated. So instead of complaining about how mean Giuliani is, why can't Obama and Clinton just tell us what they'd do?

Whining just reinforces the message that Democrats are wimps. The real way to be "hard hitting" is to explain why Giuliani is wrong and what Democrats would do instead — and why the average Joe and Jane would be safer and better off without guys like Giuliani bumbling recklessly around the globe leaving a stronger al-Qaeda and a weaker America in their wake. Until they do, Rudy and the Republicans are going to win every round of this fight.

I say that's better, but I hear in Drum's prose a contempt for the voter. Aw, it shouldn't take much to tip "the average Joe and Jane" the other way. Republican's fight incompetently, so fighting only makes things worse. Get it, you dummies?

Women and opinions.

Tom Maguire, my co-guestblogger over at Instapundit this week, observes that it's the second anniversary (tomorrow) of that Kevin Drum blog post about why there aren't more women in political blogging.

Wait! Why didn't we observe the second anniversary of that Maureen Dowd column about women columnists (which Kevin talked about):

While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating. If a man writes a scathing piece about men in power, it's seen as his job; a woman can be cast as an emasculating man-hater. I'm often asked how I can be so "mean" - a question that Tom Friedman, who writes plenty of tough columns, doesn't get.

Or even the second anniversary of my blog post talking about Dowd's column and also linked in Kevin's post):

It takes a lot nerve to put your harsh, straightforward words down on paper. You can feel entirely squelched and intimidated, yet still have those things inside you, and you could say them if somehow someone managed to give you the go-ahead. I know I've found myself able to write a lot of things down in this blog, but I've also gone many, many years holding my tongue. There may be a lot of men clamoring to speak first, easily finding a way to talk over the women who have just as much to say. It may take a little something more to unleash what women can say. Maureen Dowd doesn't explain how she was able to let loose. Someone saw she had it in her and gave her the forum, and from there she had to force herself to do it. But clearly, she could.

Frankly, I didn't even feel like I had opinons until I started writing. I had to get over the barrier and start writing, then, obligating myself to write or just falling in love with writing, I had to force myself to generate an opinion. Then there was learning how to deal with the push back. It's so unfairly easier to push back women. I really identified with that Maureen Dowd column. Women pay a price for showing some nerve. Nevertheless, it's worth it.

About that "scalping"... and other blogospheric collective activities.

After this post of mine questioning Lindsay Beyerstein's assertion that there is a right-wing term "scalping" -- meaning "pick a target and harass that person and his or her employer until the person either jumps or is pushed out of the public eye" -- and that it is exclusively the practice of the right wing, Andrew Sullivan says:

I hadn't heard this term before...

Marcotte is the alleged victim in [the case Beyerstein writes about]. But isn't the left just as guilty in hounding campaigns? Or are they too disorganized? Personally, I'm all for making life difficult for bloggers who have whored themselves out as paid propagandists for campaigns. But it's always best just to expose ugliness and dishonesty, not punish it.

Did Sullivan call writers who work for politicians whores? No. He said "whored." It's a verb, not a noun. (Remember that time on "Survivor" when Candice told Jonathan he was "trying to...weasel your way in...somehow," and Jonathan accused her of calling him a weasel, and she was all it's a verb, not a noun. She got voted off right after that, but still.) It is whoring, and it is propaganda. Let's call things what they are. Sullivan isn't saying it's morally wrong to sell your writing skills for the purpose of promoting a political agenda, just that it's a good idea to make life difficult for bloggers who move into that line of work.

And here's Ross Douthat:

Like Ann Althouse and Andrew, I must have missed the memo on this term - though it's certainly a real enough phenomenon, and "scalping" is a good a word as any. But Beyerstein's suggestion that it's the exclusive preserve of right-wingers - like most suggestions that some dirty trick is the exclusive preserve of right-wingers - is just silly.

He cites the case of Ben Domenech.

But re-reading Beyerstein, it's possible that her "unlike the liberal netroots, the right-wing blogosphere is capable of exactly one kind of collective political action" line wasn't meant to suggest that left-wingers don't scalp, but that they do other things as well, whereas right-wingers don't.

That is the better reading of what Beyerstein wrote. (Which was: "Unlike the liberal netroots, the right-wing blogosphere is capable of exactly one kind of collective political action. They call it 'scalping'...")

This is an overgeneralization, obviously, but it gets a lot closer to an interesting truth about the blogosphere, which is that the lefty blogs have become way better at doing political things - raising money, raising issues, and influencing elections at the grass/netroots level - than most of the right-wing blogs. The conservative 'sphere became adept at picking apart the MSM in the first couple years of the blogosphere, but it hasn't really adapted to the Kos/MyDD era - and its anti-MSM shtick has grown pretty stale since events in Iraq started proving Big Media right, and the warbloggers wrong.

I don't like the implication that there is a flow of things and that it goes in the direction of increasing agglomeration. Why isn't greater independence and individualism among bloggers a good thing?

Douthat points to this post by Daniel Larison:

Why have the big lefty blogs evolved into online “communities” that sponsor political activism that actually has a remote chance of influencing elections? Because the people on the left are very big into a) political activism and b) collective expressions of that political activism. They also tend to be generally outraged about the state of the world, which lends itself to blogging, while there is nothing more uninteresting than Hewittian, “Gee, I sure do support the President a lot” posts and the old chestnuts of “why aren’t they reporting the good news from Iraq?”

Well, general outrage about the state of the world is pretty uninteresting too. But what question are we asking here, how to write and interesting blog or how to be an effective political activist? Larison is really talking about the latter:

Consider that the big example of Hewittian activism today is an attempt to enforce party discipline against wayward backbenchers over a…non-binding resolution. This is not really grassroots activism, but the use of a megaphone to try to whip the Republican caucus in the media. It is furthermore the ego trip of some big name bloggers and pundits who want to display their servile attachment to the President. What is different between Kos and Hewitt? Kos actually wants to win elections and the Kossacks spend a fair amount of time thinking, however poorly, about how to do that. They haven’t had that many successes, obviously, but they actually want to expand the reach of the Democratic Party rather than retreat into the bunker with the last five true believers. Will the Kossacks become a pathetic White House-defending gang should the Dems win in ‘08? You better believe it. Nonetheless, the model of their blogs will continue to make them politically relevant in a way that the celebrity-blogging on the right never can be.

Well, I prefer what Larison seems to mean by "celebrity-blogging." And I'm quite happy to see that bloggers have trouble succeeding in their collective activities.

AND: Let me speculate that this old post by Kevin Drum is the source of the "scalping" terminology.

Liberals ideate furiously over the black-and-white McCain website.

John McCain has an aesthetically pleasing website, which is distinguished by the very low color level. Instead of the usual florid blue and red, it uses elegant, crisp black, white, and gray. Perhaps that calls to mind some beautifully photographed black and white movie. Bring on the liberal commentators, and what movie do they think of? Of course, it's "Triumph of the Will," which, admittedly, is a film known for its crisp black and white photography (to go along with its Nazi propaganda).

Here's Atrios:

Imperial Stormtrooper Chic

And here's Ezra Klein:

But to get the full flavor of the terrifyingly martial undercurrent, watch the video "stand up," which is currently the default clip on the front page. It looks like an over-the-top parody of fascist campaign propaganda from a movie, and sounds like Triumph of the Will. It's also worth noting that in an effort to shore up his conservative credentials in a particularly pandering and ghoulish way, the next video is simply called "Reagan Tribute," and the weird shoehorning of McCain's time as a POW into his admiration for Reagan really has to be seen to be believed. I don't know how many cults of personality one web site can foster, but props to the McCain team for trying to find out.

What bugs me the most about their reaction is not the usual conservatives-are-Nazis business, it's the thoughtless tainting of the aesthetic of black-and-white design, this eagerness to score political points, with no feeling for art.

Klein does have a point about the film clip. The music is over-the-top. Visually, I think the film -- Errol Morris? -- and the website are excellent, but the music is off-putting. It announces the intent to manipulate you emotionally. That makes it a less effective effort at manipulation, though. I don't think Leni Riefenstahl would have done something so crude.

ADDED: I've amused Kevin Drum.

Those contemptuous atheists... why won't they be kind?

Nicholas Kristof -- in a TimesSelect column -- wants atheists to back off and quit pressuring religious people about their beliefs:

[There is] an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive led in part by [Richard] Dawkins — the Oxford scientist who is author of the new best seller “The God Delusion.” It’s a militant, in-your-face brand of atheism that he and others are proselytizing for....

[T]he tone of this Charge of the Atheist Brigade is ... contemptuous and even ... a bit fundamentalist.

“These writers share a few things with the zealous religionists they oppose, such as a high degree of dogmatism and an aggressive rhetorical style,” says John Green of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “Indeed, one could speak of a secular fundamentalism that resembles religious fundamentalism. This may be one of those cases where opposites converge.”...

Now that the Christian Right has largely retreated from the culture wars, let’s hope that the Atheist Left doesn’t revive them. We’ve suffered enough from religious intolerance that the last thing the world needs is irreligious intolerance.

The Christian Right has largely retreated from the culture wars? In-your-face atheists are "the Atheist Left"? Is this just a right-left political battle? I think at least some of this is a genuine debate about religion. Whether it's a cloaked political debate, a mixed political-religious debate, or purely a debate about religion, there is a place for pointed humor and harsh argument. I generally favor respecting religious beliefs. It's usually best not to go at religious people with mockery and contempt. For one thing, if you want to persuade people, it's usually better not to demonize them or call them idiots. But it's also a bad idea to stir up a lot of free-floating hostility. Nevertheless, we do need some strong voices in the mix, and I'd hate to live in a world where all the opinion was tamped down and moderated. I just hope that those who go in for mockery do it well. Dawkins is pretty good at it. He just needs more smart, tough people on the other side to joust with him.

Note: In an amazing deviation from the usual NYT approach, Kristof's column contains an actual hot link that sends you away from the NYT website. (It takes you to Why Won't God Heal the Amputees? (Which is a damned good question.)) The link is right in the second paragraph, demonstrating an astounding trust in the reader's ability to remember to come back and finish reading the column. Talk about faith!

ADDED: Like me, Kevin Drum is incredulous about Kristof's assertion that the Christian Right has largely retreated from the culture wars.

"Do you really think that's the place for a thousand words of pitchfork-waving, tax-cut-hating, populist agit-prop?"

Howard Dean is asked by Kevin Drum, who reminds him "Dude. You were writing in the fucking Wall Street Journal." Quite aside from what one ought to say in the Wall Street Journal, Drum is anguished that the Dems seem to be turning away from the idea of making national security their central issue. Liberal bloggers seem to be freaking out about it.