blogger interrupted

I have a love hate relationship with the lefty blogosphere, and on both ends of that spectrum, it’s pretty extreme.  Which might explain why I find this post so easy to write.

Back in the beginnings of the liberal blogosphere, the self-proclaimed “leaders” of the leftysphere decided among themselves that what we Democrats needed was a self-reinforcing “echo-chamber”, just like the Rovian hordes have on talk radio.  So the self-described “experts” on all matters bloggy sought out the self-identified “progressive” voices to push their self-created pet issues.  

After messy fits and starts, ideological battles with the “wrong” voices, and a little chicanery, the echo chamber was created, sorta.  Mostly, the echo chamber doesn’t really work, because there are too many voices for the self-appointed “leaders” to control.  But occasionally, it does work, most often when some common denominator of lefty hyperbole manages to scratch everyone’s self-obsessed itch at the same time.  

Ned Lamont.  Paul Hackett.  Howard Dean.  The Plame affair.  When the critical mass “emerges” from this echo-chamber, the self-appointed leaders hammer it day in and day out, post after post, until it becomes impossible to wander into the leftysphere without being bombarded with the pet issue of the day, week, month, or year.  

The echo chamber then convinces those within it that such issues are THE important issues.  After all, everyone talks about them, all the time!  The only problem is that normal people, i.e. people who aren’t lefty bloggers, don’t care one bit.  Find one person out of 100 in a grocery store who can identify Lamont, Hackett, Dean, and Plame, all of them, and I’ll buy you a donut.

Thus the echo chamber self-creates a self-fulfilling mechanism of self-aggrievment.  Once the real world emits a giant yawn, or worse, a quiet decision to go the other direction, the self-obsessed self-appointed “leaders” cry the wail of the scorned, the slippery slopers, the falling sky-ers, it all rises up among them like hellfire, as loud as they can, until the echo chamber finally self-exhausts, quiets down, and finds the next self-identified “big issue”, and the cycle self-resumes.

Enter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, a quirk of law so obscure that most law students never study it, because most lawyers never encounter it.  But it’s the perfect issue for the echo chamber - Bush hate, Iraq, terrorism, civil liberties, THE CONSTITUTION MY GOD THE CONSTITUTION - all combine into a deliciously designed scratch for every itch the self-credentialled “experts” of the leftysphere ever self-taught themselves to self-obsess over.

Then Barack Obama reminds them, once again, that no normal non-blogger American cares, and if they do, they disagree, and so Obama agrees with the normal people.  

And all hell breaks loose.  Again.

It is yet another example of How Barack Obama Has Changed Everything Already.  Barack and his team knew from the beginning that to play ball with this crowd was a losing proposition.  Barack’s team went around the self-appointees, to the audience, and built the support from the ground up, until the readership of the self-proclaimed “leaders” forced the hand.  

Cue the complaints about the blogosphere merely being expected to be an ATM for candidates.  Not so fast.  During this presidential primary, not one of the self-endowed ATM machines ever, not once, asked their readership to donate to Barack.  I know, because I watched.  It’s not like these guys are shy of primaries, but this one, they cowered from.  Not until it became clear that Barack would win, did any of these self-described ATM’s even advocate for Barack, let alone give him their PIN number in the form of a post with a Donate link on it.  In fact, if a study were done of Barack’s low dollar donors, I would be amazed if a single one of those who donated to Barack before, say, June, 2008, got to the donate page via a front page post from the self-described ATM “leaders”.  

Now these are all good Democrats, the self-aggrieved.  I’m sure they are.  They’ll get over it.  It’s painful to watch, but they will.  And once they do, they’ll find some other thing to obssess over that no one else in the real world gives a rat’s ass about.  Let’s just hope they don’t do it until Barack Obama is president.

Until then, Barack Obama is moving on, like he should.  He’s not beholden to them, or anyone.  And that’s a real good thing.

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