These guys just crack me up:
In a discussion of the Romney campaign’s outreach to the wingnutosphere earlier this month, I mentioned in passing the apparent preoccupation of these new partners in crime with Twitter wars, and particularly the belief that Hilaryrosengate represented some sort of historic triumph for The Cause.
This preoccupation seems to be growing, viz. this gloating post today from John Hinderaker at PowerLine:
We are in the early stages of the 2012 campaign season, with a lot of battlespace preparation going on. In the skirmishing so far, one perhaps surprising media advantage has become clear: the right is clobbering the left on Twitter.
Maybe it’s because Twitter puts a premium on brevity and cleverness. I don’t know. But for some reason, it seems to be a natural medium for conservatives. We saw it when the Hilary Rosen interview (“Ann Romney never worked a day in her life”) prompted a Twitterstorm. We saw it again when #ObamaEatsDogs exploded, and when #Julia blew up in the White House’s face like an exploding cigar. Currently, the White House is promoting #AskMichelle, where loyal Democrats can go to ask the First Lady a question. Only nearly all of the questions have come from conservatives.
Yes, the 2012 election hinges on 140 character grunts of thinly veiled racism and misogyny that wingnuts blast at each other.
Brachiator
Fixt. Too easy.
Freddie
That post is like bragging that your mom thinks you’re cool.
trollhattan
Hindrocket sure loves him some military metaphors. They’re always so…apt when discussing politics. Which branch did he serve in?
The Other Chuck
The right does appear to have a lock on internet trolling, I’ll give them that.
Otherwise, it’s quite a bubble that they live in, ainnit?
Woodrowfan
best comment so far on the piece to which you linked, “This is John Hinderaker we’re talking about. He gloats when his can of soda doesn’t spray him in the face when he opens it.”
heh :)
dmsilev
Just so that it’s never forgotten:
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
battlespace? skirmishing?
Oh, you chickenhawks, you never change, do you?
Egg Berry
@dmsilev:
To be fair, he did get that part right.
FlipYrWhig
What do they even think they’re measuring? Are they just gloating about any example they can find of “Conservatives Have More X”?
guachi
And yet Obama supporting gay marriage was one of the most twittered things ever.
Martin
WereBear
Hmmm, short-lived and isolated pop culture moment that doesn’t even slashdot anyone… smells like VICTORY!
Zifnab25
“Now that we’ve got an army of angry twitters, there’s no way Romney can lose in November!”
#wishfulthinking
Soonergrunt
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: I noticed that part too. “Battlespace preparation” is a military concept. And it’s the closest that shitbird ever got to the military, but they do loves them some military concepts.
Epicurus
Notice, please, that the Hindrocket calmly ignores all the polls showing the President kicking the Romneybot’s ass…but then, it is Powerline, fairy tales for basement-dwellers.
Clime Acts
Cole, aren’t you on the Twits all the time?
lacp
Twitter is a pretty powerful social medium. Whether wingnuts can use it effectively to recruit non-wingnuts is a horse of a different feather.
opie jeanne
I have no idea what the #Julia is that is referred to in the above.
grape_crush
…it seems to be a natural medium for conservatives.
Bumper-sticker medium for bumper-sticker thoughts.
Plus, Twitter can be easily manipulated to give the appearance of there being a mass wave of interest…and it’s no secret that right-whingers like Hinderaker value quantity of thought over quality.
It’s whoever shouts the loudest, right?
daveNYC
So conservatives have an edge in the battle of incomplete sentences and mis-spelled words? Guess it’s time to have Yglesias up his rate of posting.
Villago Delenda Est
@trollhattan:
That would be the 101st Chairborne.
Forum Transmitted Disease
I’m as wired in as it is possible to be without surgery, and I do not have a Twitter account.
If you’re pinning your campaign’s hopes on Twitter, you are fucked.
Chyron HR
I’d love to see a campaign ad done in a faux-Ken Burns style, with a montage of black and white photos of Republican elected officials, while serious-sounding people somberly read aloud their semi-literate Tweets like “Am ppl r not stupid as this x prof of con law”.
But it would probably go over most viewers’ heads.
trollhattan
@opie jeanne:
Me either. Whatever it was, it was an AWESOME REPUBLICAN TRIUMPH and Julia has been put in her place.
I guess.
Chyron HR
Also, too:
“McCain takes lead on YouTube hits”
– The Washington Times, August 7, 2008
jibeaux
@FlipYrWhig: “Let’s look at the swing state poll numbers oh holy fu….tell you what, let’s get #ObamaEatsDog trending. That’s gotta be worth something.”
SpotWeld
Did that actually happen.
For as nears as I can tell, the whole Julia senario was a something for folks what want to take the long view of things. The people who want to look at the span of one’s life and ask “is my life better with or without goverment intervention”.
Not the sort of folks who have thier opinions informed via twitter.
jl
I checked TPM poll tracker this weekend and it seems to me that the election will depend on GOTV, turnout, and success of GOP voter suppression efforts.
My routine is to filter out partisan pollsters and Rasumussen. The look at trends over time stratified by all adults, registered voters and likely voters. You see fewer gyrations and clearer trends over time.
If the election were decided by all adults and registered voters, Obama has had a steady lead. Much narrower among likely voters, which is not actually a homogenous group since it depends on how different polls model likely voters.
Doing this routine for about a couple of months, I see very little evidence that Romney has made any dent at all in a steady Obama lead among the adult and registered voter population. So it is about who shows up in November.
I figure that is the best I can do until fivethirtyeight blog gets its poll aggregator prediction machine revved up this summer.
So, if the GOP wants to bamboozle itself with piffle, fine with me.
jibeaux
Wait, isn’t the saying “As goes the Twitterverse, so goes the country?”
I don’t even have anyone except liberals and comedians on my twitter feed, and I don’t ever use it. Took a stab at it, but it’s just too asinine.
gbear
Bragging up your ownership of the twitterverse is like bragging that your gang has total ownership of the Har Mar Mall (Twin Cities reference for the Hindrocket).
Villago Delenda Est
@Chyron HR:
What they fail to understand (and of course, this is all perfectly predictable) a YouTube hit for McCain or Romney may very well be people who voted or will vote for Obama bringing it up to laugh at it. Not with it.
The stupidity of wingtards knows no bounds.
trollhattan
@Villago Delenda Est:
“The Fightin’ Eameses” does put a certain twinge of fear into my psyche.
Jamey
Yes, the War on Women will be won in the Twitter-trenches.
Was Hinderaker molested by clowns as a kid?
fasteddie9318
Um, of course conservatives are good at Twitter. It’s got ”twit” right in the name.
Nellcote
@jl:
This above all.
jibeaux
@SpotWeld: So far, you seem to be the only one who knows what the hell it’s about, so your guess is the best one here.
Villago Delenda Est
@jl:
No more obvious example than our idiot VICTORY troll, who constantly tries to convince himself more than any of us that Rmoney has a ghost of a chance.
28 Percent
Briefer, wittier Hinderaker:
We’re in r basementz pwning ur d00dz! Circlejerks FTW Bitchez!
trollhattan
‘Tis true that Twitter can be a good platform for certain political critters.
http://twitter.com/#!/sutterbrown
Joseph Nobles
Twitter is the ultimate confirmation bias machine. The Powerline con guy is just indulging in readership capture.
jibeaux
@Jamey: the twenches
stratplayer
I just love these little displays of right-wing intellectual insecurity. There are a few non-stupid conservatives out there, but none of them has the guts to admit that they’ve consciously adopted an ideology that attracts a far greater proportion of idiots and assholes (as it is designed to do) than does the opposition. It’s a fact, righties. Deal with it.
Amir Khalid
The notion that winning the Twitter war confers some practical advantage for the right seems to bee a testable claim of fact. So, is there evidence that Twitter actually does shape public opinion? I mean, do these pundits have millions of Twitter followers like, you know, Justin Bieber? Do the opinion polls show a consistent pattern of shifting on a clever 140-character zinger?
I eagerly await rigorous validation for these claims of twitter VICTORY!
Violet
“Battlespace” is so telling. They don’t think of it as voting for the people who will be the best people to run the country. They think of it as war. No wonder “compromise” means “make them agree with us.” Conversion by the sword or nothing.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@jl:
I’ve got to wonder if Nate will succumb to the “horserace” mentality. I mean, for God’s sake, if you were Nate Silver, what could be more integral to your professional survival?
If he doesn’t succumb, the man is a true stats monk worthy of whatever praise he receives.
jibeaux
Also too, of my FB friends who discussed the issue, they were 100% opposed to Amendment One and they felt very strongly about it. So Q E Fucking D.
jl
@SpotWeld:
” Did that actually happen. ”
I think that is the key question for this stuff, but maybe not in the way you meant it.
For the mass of voters in the country, did any of this stuff that the wingnuts and teabaggers actually happen. As far as I can tell, no it did not happen.
For example, I still am unclear exactly why anyone should give a moldy fig about what Hilary Rosen thinks, and the only indication I have that her opinion means anything is that she was on TV.
Most people I talk with have no idea any of these earth shattering epic turning points have occurred.
People know Obama went to Afghanistan, said he is personally in favor of gay marriage, Romney is weird and a big business man and maybe that is what we need/don’t need to get the economy going again; that is what people I’ve talked with know (for example, visiting home for Mother’s Day and seeing a few old buddies. Sorry no taxi drivers!)
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid:
When Michael Steel was running for RNC Chair, one of his campaign points was, and I kid you not, he had the most Facebook friends of any of the candidates.
Uh. Huh.
J.W. Hamner
Are there people on Twitter who actually pay attention to trending topics? Weird.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@Amir Khalid: Didn’t I read in the early days of Twitter, Republicans had seized it as a medium, commenting at a 3-1 rate during the Obama-McCain contest?
I thought at that time that it would be a doomed medium. Since then, I’ve come to enjoy my Twitter feed, though the people I follow wouldn’t give me a real good view about the broader Twitter universe. And that would be something I reckon all Twitterers could say.
Steve
Wingnuts subscribe to a Charlie Sheen philosophy, where winning an argument consists solely of declaring yourself the winner. A classic example was the Sandra Fluke debacle, where they tried vainly to fight back by playing a tu quoque game with Bill Maher, and the next thing you know you have Instapundit saying, “Wow, this one blew up in the Democrats’ face again”… uh, what?
piratedan
well twitter does appear to encapsulate the attention span of the average american voter……
Cluttered Mind
@Violet: I agree. Especially telling is that this is the only kind of “war” that Buttmissile or any of his colleagues would ever willingly travel within 1000 miles of. They are quite fond of using war terminology to describe this stuff because it helps them compensate for the fact that they’re the kind of people who would rather literally crap their pants than go anywhere near a real fight.
jl
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
Being a statistician, I will judge Silver’s integrity by how forthcoming he is with the guts of his methods. And can we download the data? Pollster blogs used to offer the data in a useable form so anyone could run the numbers or do a sensitivity analysis. Not sure what happens when a big doofus pompous need-some-bucks-right-now, dimwit marketing scheme flop organization like NYT has a say.
Hoodie
Twitter is the internet equivalent of armpit-farting.
Roger Moore
More likely, it’s because Twitter includes a button to repeat exactly what the other guy said, which meshes perfectly with the existing Republican messaging process. Retweet is perfect for creating an echo chamber.
Jamey
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
I’ve been wrong about this sorta thing before, but Nate seems to have a fair amount of integrity. Also, too, staying clear of the fray got Nate a NYT gig, so impartiality and accuracy are kinda what his brand is all about.
pragmatism
dear mr. assrocket:
how can one quantify your assertion that conservatives are “clobbering” the left?
thanks in advance.
Chyron HR
Also, three, how many of these conservative questions are “y r u such a fat BITCH lol #moochelle #chimpout #WAR”?
Nellcote
since it’s always opposite day in wingerworld he probably means that more goopers have been blocked by people than liberals. victory!
mai naem
John did you not get the WH/George Soros May memo? You just tipped off the right wingers about the Twitter deal. We are to let them win at Twitter while we win at Facebook,Google circle, delicio, reddit and metafilter. You really need to get with the program or you aren’t going to be getting that sweeeet George Soros check in December.
jayackroyd
Funny. Celebrating trolls.
RossinDetroit
@jl:
Popular vote is in Obama’s favor and may be above margin of error, but according to Silver that doesn’t tell the EC story. Tallying the EC votes has Mitt being whomped because where he wins he wins big yet he loses the states he needs to swing to put him over the top in EC votes. Just a bad arrangement that could give the Dems a win in Electoral College votes out of proportion to their popular vote totals. Longshot possibility: a win for the Dems like Bush’s in 2000 without a popular vote majority.
Martin
“I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him!”
RossinDetroit
Tweets have all the influence of color commentary at a football game, and they aren’t crowning winners and losers in the broadcast studio.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@Jamey: I’ll trust Nate the Great’s judgment as long as he continues to show the same kind of integrity that brought him to where he is now. He is, until he starts to behave otherwise, the gold standard.
But I’m also wary because of some wise words I heard once … actually @jl just now:
It’s not Nate I mistrust as much as the NYT. “Liberal” or not – and I’d argue the “or not” side as many days as not – they need the horserace just as much as the Post or CNN or Fox does.
Jeff Fecke
@gbear:
Why would you insult Har Mar like that?
Steve in DC
I dunno, I do think twitter is having a larger impact than most people give it credit for. Mostly because cable news insists on treating tweets as news.
Social media is horrible in general. But it does enable people to throw shit at the wall and have the press act as if it’s important.
Nobody would give a shit about the clever (or bad) youtube campaign videos or tweets if it wasn’t for CNN/MSNBC/FOX insisting on putting them on the news.
Politicians know that and have been using twitter and other tools to troll the press.
Splitting Image
Twitter seems to be very similar to Tumblr without the pretty pictures. All you do on Twitter is add your friends and search the site for some like-minded famous people, then post things you think are witty and endlessly re-tweet people who agree with you.
Facebook is similar, except that it actually has useful tools to bring people together. You can make a Facebook event and invite all your friends, or leave it open for people who share your interest in steampunk Rubik’s cubes to join and meet up with them. Tumblr and Twitter don’t really have that functionality. It’s just an endless circle jerk.
Boots Day
Does Hinderaker even understand how Twitter works? It’s the ultimate closed information loop. You get tweets only from the people you choose to get tweets from.
Like most Democrats, I’ve never seen a tweet from a conservative pundit. The wingers can tweet all they want, and it’s not going to move a single vote from the D column to the R column.
liz
It’s amusing that conservitards think they’re so “good” at twitter because it stresses cleverness. No, they dominate it because they’re incapable of having thoughts that actually extend beyond one sentence.
jayackroyd
@Splitting Image:
Blog comments, OTOH….
Jamey
@Evolving Deep Southerner: Another excellent point. I don’t know what kind of content distribution agreement Nate has with NYT, but at this point–with the Times always just a step or two ahead of disaster and the 2012 election looming–I think NYT need Nate more than Nate needs the Paper of Record.
So, yes, I will wait and see, but I think even the Times’s nabobery can see that Nate’s value lies in his ability to accurately predict outcomes and maintain the appearance of objectivity.
Amir Khalid
@Villago Delenda Est:
Correlation =/= causation, of course. But Michael Steele did win that RNC chairmanship, didn’t he? And the judgement he showed in that post was as sound as his logic in making that Facebook claim.
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
That was great news for John McCain, right?
Evolving Deep Southerner
@Boots Day:
I do get them from Ralph Reed. But only because he’s from my hometown and because I want to hurl the foulest abuse I can think of whenever he tweets about the most inane thing.
And “the most inane thing” is ALL that fucker tweets. “Ah, landing in the NY airport on the way to blah-de-blah.” Or “Enjoyed blah-de-blah at blad-de-blah with my family!”
I guess he got so badly abused when he tweeted that “We forgive you for Sandra Fluke, Rush!” shit that he’s not comfortable giving anything more substantive than where he’s at and what inane thing he’s doing there.
Either that, or the hack fucker is just desperately trying to let any- and everyone know that, yes, he is still alive, and still just as smart as ever.
Steve in DC
@Boots Day
It’s not twitter that’s the issue, it’s the press. Cable news insists on treating tweets, facebook, and youtube as actual news. All any politician has to do is tweet something and blamo, that’s news! Up on the TV it goes and now all the talking heads are talking about who tweeted what stupid thing and who’s youtube video is better. It also gets sucked into online news as well.
The Republicans were really good at baiting the media into treating online bullshit as news in the primaries. It’s a great tactic. Release something online and the press will spend the next few days talking non stop about what you did till the next stupid thing comes out.
You may think tweets don’t matter and nobody see’s them… go watch CNN or MSNBC or FOX, they sure as hell seem to think they are news.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@jl: IDK how Silver’s going to be now that he’s at the Times. Before, he went over in excruciating detail about where he got his numbers from and how he put together his analyses. Hope he continues in that vein.
No One of Consequence
@Hoodie: He shoots! He scores! Where would you like your +1 Internets delivered sir?
– NOoC
FlipYrWhig
@Steve in DC: It’s free content. Somewhere along the way “the news” decided that it was vitally important to spend time revealing, unfiltered, what the viewers already thought, as opposed to, say, attempting to inform them.
jayackroyd
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
Why? Why would you not follow conservatives? I mean, nothing beat Gingrich’s stream for pure entertainment value. Jon Henke gives you a sense of what pseudo intellectual right is talking about. Julian Sanchez is just a smart guy. Jesse Walker tweets about a wide variety of topics.
But the real value of twitter is that it’s a huge comment thread for the entire internet. It has devastated blogs like Swampland; some of their best posters decamped to twitter because it has many more interesting people there, and your stream is always troll free (because, of course, you don’t follow trolls).
That’s why it’s especially wacky for the wingnuts to think they’ve won. The trolls win when they prevent commentary from taking place–look at Tapper’s blog, for instance. The trolls have made it unreadable. But they can’t do that for twitter–they can’t bury interesting commentary by filling the stream with repetitive chaff.
kth
Historians will remember the Twitter War as a mere squirmish compared to the Haiku War that erupted later in the year.
WereBear
It’s Hindrocket. He nicknamed himself that. I’m guessing… no.
jayackroyd
@Steve in DC:
” All any politician has to do is tweet something and blamo, that’s news! ”
Well, isn’t it? It’s really hard to get politicians to say anything at all straightforward. Mostly they don’t, on twitter. Even the politicians who write their own tweets, like McCaskill and (I think) Wasserman-Schulz, stick to saccharine “Yay MO!” “FL rules” kind of tweets.
So, yeah, if a politician says something newsworthy on his or her tweet stream, of course it should be reported.
(I’m kinda wondering whether the twitter critics have actually spent much time on twitter.)
Boots Day
I understand that people are going to report on it if Newt Gingrich tweets that he ate a small Honduran child for lunch, but that doesn’t sound like what Hinderaker is talking about. He’s claiming that run-of-the-mill right-wing snarkery is some kind of important factor in the election. And it’s not.
Steve in DC
@jayackroyd
Because most of it isn’t factual. It’s just inane opinions and ramblings. Not statements of facts. It’s very easy to troll the press. Tweet something, doesn’t even have to be true, and that’s the story for the next few days till someone else does the same damn thing.
The problem is the press is inept.
Ash Can
Twitter? They’re bragging about Twitter? That’s awesome.
Yevgraf
@Villago Delenda Est:
“I wanna be a Chairborne Ranger, live a life of sex and danger…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUViWXZ2qQY
Walker
@opie jeanne:
It is the “Life of Julia” presentation on the White House website. They somehow believe that their Twitter campaign mocking it successfully shut it down. Despite the fact that it is well received by women, the target demographic.
Yevgraf
@RossinDetroit:
In the event this comes to pass, clearly, to preserve the nation and the integrity of elections, Obama must allow the House of Representatives as composed to decide the winner. Democracy depends on it.
/Thomas Friedman
Steve in DC
@Boots Day
Except for leading GOP members retweeting right-wing idiocy they come across and like and then it gets in the news.
And that’s a huge problem. When someone on the left comes out and says something stupid on a blog that’s it, they let it die. Someone on the right does it and some GOP big wig runs with it and then it’s news.
Walker
@J.W. Hamner:
The analysis on Twitter posts during Game of Thrones episodes over at WinterIsComing.net is awesome.
Politics? Not so much.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@jayackroyd:
Point well taken. In fact, it makes me wonder how many of the people following them and retweeting them now – which is what they’re bragging about, I guess – are doing so in the spirit of “Will you all look at what this dumb fucker is tweeting?”
And anything we can do to give them a false sense of “winning” is a good thing.
jayackroyd
@Steve in DC:
You specifically referred to politicians saying things. The fact that a politician said something stupid, or wrong, or revelatory is certainly news.
Corey
If I wasn’t lazy, I’d pull together quotes of conservatives through the ages claiming they’re “better on Twitter”, whatever that means. That was the meme coming from those folks after 2008, after the election as Twitter was just becoming mainstream, there are endless Patrick Ruffini posts where the dude just bleats “Twitter! Twitter! Twitter!”
Canuckistani Tom
When do we start electing people based on their Klout number?
Maus
People might expect them to explain their narrative using facts when granted more than 140 characters.
Maus
@Steve: Because “liberals” love Bill Maher, and don’t also think he’s a misogynist asshole.
He’s not even a Democrat, for chrissakes, he’s a Libertarian.
Patricia Kayden
I would love for Dems to tweet about the Repub War on Women by bullet pointing all the anti-contraception, anti-Planned Parenthood, vagina probe laws that have cropped up in Tea Party states.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@Boots Day:
Fill in the blank however you want, and the answer is “no.”
opie jeanne
@Walker: Thanks. I realized after I had posted that I did know about Julia, but still had no idea that there it had “blown up”. I found an article about it on the Christian Scientist Monitor that ‘splained it all to me, including how the RW Twits thought they had brought it down, although CSM pointed out that the project was pretty popular with women.
Southern Beale
LOL.
“NO BILL OVER 3 PAGES!” That was a Republican idea, yes?
:-)
Gus
This is the danger of sitting in an echo chamber. The “Obama eats dogs” think blew up? Maybe among the developmentally stunted high-fiving frat boy douchebags that Assmissle hangs with.
Cassidy
I say we “prep the battlefield” starting at the convention.
dr. bloor
TBogg has a post up pointing out just how badly we’re losing the twit twat war.
Citizen_X
Sure, bin Laden may have gotten shot through the eye, but other than that, he was totally killing on Twitter.
And how about ChatRoolette? Is the right kicking our asses there, too?
Catsy
@grape_crush:
This, exactly, is why conservatives are so enamored of Twitter. It’s a lot easier to bleat about “death panels” and “tax-and-spend socialism” in 140 characters or less than it is to explain how the PPACA improves access to health care and reduces the deficit.
@Steve in DC:
I’m sorry, did you just point to the content of Fox programming as an example of how Twitter matters? Do you really think that Fox needs tweets from Newt Gingrich to bolster their claim that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim declaring war on marriage–or that anyone who came away from a typical Fox political segment with anything approaching approval is even reachable?
As regards CNN and MSNBC, who cares? All Republicans have in Twitter is a new source of noise for the right-wing puke funnel. You may have noticed that they don’t exactly have a shortage of those. Anyone stupid enough that their opinion on a given subject can be swayed by the fact that wingnuts spawned a Zerg rush of bullshit about that subject on Twitter is already long lost to the bevy of other sources of said bullshit.
Randy P
@Clime Acts:
Your posts have so much more variety and entertainment value since I put in the pie filter.
El Cid
We need a conservative-friendly social media which limits comments to 20 characters so that the elitists who love sentences so much won’t dominate.
gaz
@Southern Beale: FTW
By 2016 if a bill can’t fit in a twit, it’ll be too lengthy, amirite?
EvilleMike
@Brachiator: But that’s the problem.
Never underestimate the power of ignorance. These guys think a good bumper sticker is all you need for solid common sense governance.
If the campaign gets decided in Twitterspace, then Repubs have a real chance.