Friday, February 16, 2007

Fighting Ire with Ire

Dan Gerstein has a great column at politico.com stating that Amandagate highlights the political immaturity of liberal bloggers.

If the liberal blogs want to understand why so few people outside their narrow echo chamber take them seriously, and what it will take to gain the broader credibility they crave, they should look no further than their handling of the recent flap over John Edwards’ foul-mouthed blogger hires.

This ugly morality tale - which mercifully concluded Tuesday with the second of the two offending online staffers resigning from the Edwards campaign - revealed the Kossacks in all their angry adolescent glory: impudent, impotent, unreflective and unaccountable.

Throughout the course of the controversy, the left’s bigger digital diatribers never stopped to address the substance of what the Edwards bloggers actually wrote before joining the campaign. Had the bloggers done so, they might have found the postings were widely deemed by Democrats and Republicans alike as bigoted and patently offensive to many Christians, not just devout Catholics or evangelicals.

Nor did they ever stop to think how hollow and hypocritical it sounded for the same people who ravaged George Allen, for his “macaca” moment in last year’s Virginia Senate campaign to cry "free speech" when confronted with a far more nasty, vulgar, and hurtful display of prejudice from two of their own.

Instead, right until the bitter end, most liberal bloggers responded in their familiar mode – by lashing out at their critics and trying to marginalize them. This was, in their eyes, purely a manufactured controversy by the "right-wing smear machine" and a cynical attempt to silence and marginalize the Netroots.

Hate to be the one to break it to you, Dan, but Amanda is still reacting that way. Amanda still blames her demise on William Donohue and right-wing bloggers.

But as Gerstein points out, Donohue wasn't the problem. The problem was that Amanda's "satirical, thought-provoking commentary" offended a wide range of possible Democratic voters.
But the reality is, as I experienced over and over again in the Lamont-Lieberman race, this is the liberal blogosphere’s standard-less operating procedure. They have decided that the best way to fight the “right-wing smear machine” that they so despise is to create an even more venomous, boundary-less, and destructive counterpart and fight ire with more ire.

It also goes to show just how deeply most liberal bloggers believe that Republicans and conservative are morally illegitimate, and as such, any criticism or argument made by the other side is on its face corrupt and dismissible. If it is said by Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who has a history of controversial statements himself, it automatically becomes invalid, no matter the inherent integrity of the underlying proposition.

What these liberal bloggers fail to appreciate is that this petty, polarizing approach is not how you ultimately win in politics – especially in an era when most average voters outside the ideological extremes are fed up with the shrill, reflexive partisanship that dominates Washington, and when the fastest growing party in America is no party.

Gerstein points out an unpleasant fact for the moonbatosphere: survey after survey shows that conservatives outnumber liberals 3-2, and that unless Democrats want to be the perpetual minority party, they must find a way to appeal to middle-of-the-road Americans who aren't totally absorbed by the latest blogosphere dust-up.

In Amanda's Salon piece, she says that this episode may quash attempts by Democrats to reach out to young feminists. The truth is, as nice and Democratic as it is to appeal to young people, they don't vote. Not like older people do. And most of those people are turned off by people using f*** and c*** and a dozen other words in every other sentence. They are turned off by people who think poking fun at Catholic dogma is "satire," or that calling Jesus "Jeebus" is funny. Most voters are ambivalent about abortion or believe it should be more, not less, restricted than it currently is.

Gerstein is right that the political immaturity of the leftosphere is damaging them more than William Donohue and the Catholic League ever could.

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On another note (I didn't want to make a new post just for this), is it my imagination or is Amanda now the new poster child for the leftosphere? Not only is she whining on Pandagon constantly, she's got the Salon piece and a new column at the Huffington Post. I guess Amanda can dry her crocodile tears and smooth out her crinoline skirt now. It seems like she is the flavor of the month.