Andrew Sullivan, with whom I rarely agree, has an excellent post about the idea of scalping.
The term was originally used by Lindsay Beyerstein in the above linked Salon.com article. She uses the term derisively to describe rightwingers who "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."
Sullivan points out the obvious.
Marcotte is the alleged victim in this case. 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.
All you have to do is read a few liberal blogs before you see the exact same pattern develop on the left that they assailed from the right. And, truthfully, I don't know of any rightwing bloggers who wanted Marcotte fired. They saw her as a wonderful albatross around the Breck girl's neck and wanted her to stay there.
It's amusing to me to hear the shrieks from the left about Amandagate, as though they have never gone after any target on the right with the same visciousness (Robert Bork, anyone?). The difference is that lefties haven't been able to force a change in behavior by most of the targets they go after. That's not to say they don't try, though.
Ann Althouse discusses this, as well as this by Ross Douthat.
Douthat points out that the meaning of Beyerstein's "scalping" statement could be going to the idea that conservative bloggers don't do other things as well as liberal bloggers do.
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. 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. Daniel Larison had a smart post on this subject recently, in which he remarked: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?”
And Larison points out that the blogosphere has come to power during a Republican administration. It's easier to attack administration policy rather than defend it.
With the Democratic win in the fall elections, Republicans (and their bloggers) need to figure out how to turn the loss into a win. That's not to say whitewash the loss; it means t learn from it. For bloggers, it will mean finding ways to create similar "communities" who will be motivated to action for Republican causes. This will be difficult since conservatism doesn't lend itself to such behavior in the first place. But if conservatives desire not to cede the blogosphere to the lefties, they will have to find ways to motivate readers.
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