Has the NYT learned nothing and forgotten nothing?
UPDATE: Evangelical Outpost, of all places (hat tip: Powerline), seems to think the 10-page feature on several lefty bloggers (plus sex-obsessed Wonkette) is actually filled with biting criticism (aside from Matthew Klam's transparent desire to get to Wonkette's third base). We link, you decide.
UPDATE 2: David Frum agrees with EO.
Anyway, why shouldn't Klam focus on left-wing bloggers? They’re an important story - from the point of view of the Times and its constituencies, a supremely important story.Back when Howard Dean was still running for president, we heard a great deal about the energy and excitement that left-wing blogs were sparking among young voters. Then, after all that energy and excitement blew out Dean’s fuses, the left-wing bloggers went to work for their new hero, John Kerry.
By now, it’s pretty clear that all this energy and enthusiasm has done Kerry nothing but harm.
[...]In politics as in retailing, you never argue with the customer. If the polls are accurate, the American people perceive George W. Bush as a upright and honorable man. On the other hand, they don't much like his economic policies, and they worry that he may be too much of a risk-taker in foreign affairs.
A smart political operation would work on those pre-existing weaknesses. It wouldn’t waste time trying to convince an incredulous public that the genial likeable man they see on television is in reality the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler.
But the Democratic political operation of 2004 has not been smart. It has in fact been astonishingly, gaspingly, Guiness Book of Records stupid. It has been simultaneously hysterical and harmless, irate and irrelevant, paranoid and purblind.
The left-wing blogs have to take a considerable share of the blame for this disaster. They were a crucial part of the in-group conversation by which the most partisan Democrats convinced each other that the country feared and hated George W. Bush as much as they did. This delusion – combined with the decision to nominate a man to whom haughty disdain came all too naturally – pushed the Democrats to mistake after mistake and blinded them to opportunity after opportunity.
Matthew Klam’s piece pays little attention to the political consequences of left-wing blogging. He amuses himself instead with a brutal evisceration of the ambitions and delusions of three of the best-known left-wing bloggers in his gunsights: the above-mentioned Marshall, Ann Marie Cox of Wonkette.com, and Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos.com. Klam deftly portrays Marshall’s obsessive hunting of Great White Whale conspiracies, the grungy ideological fanaticism of the Daily Kos, and the desperately flailing attention-seeking of Wonkette. Klam's piece cannot make for pleasant reading for any of his subjects. And I suspect that the unpleasantness must have come as quite a shock.
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