I swore to myself when I read this earlier that I was not going to write about it, but it just appears that I am a sucker for this sort of shit:
Susie Madrak started blogging in 2001, just after Sept. 11, back when the country was hurtling head-first into war and the blogosphere was a mysterious frontier on the far edges of the Internet.
“It was infuriating,” Madrak recalled of the political moment that spurred her to start throwing her own commentary online. “I could see that they were fabricating the reasons for war. Blogging was what I did instead of throwing a brick through the window.”
She started her own site, called Suburban Guerilla, and it soon became one of the boldface blogs of the “Netroots,” a new network of engaged political progressives giving a voice they thought was missing in the mainstream press. In time, millions like her took to their own keyboards, and thousands of similar sites bloomed. The Netroots became the world’s first online grassroots political organizing effort, and the goal was nothing less than to remake the American political system by pushing Democrats leftward.
“We didn’t trust the traditional progressive movement—labor, the issue orgs, the party—because of a record of failure and futility,” writes Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, in an email. “In turn, they didn’t like us petulant upstarts. A popular sentiment was, ‘What are those bloggers going to do, hit George Bush in the head with a laptop?’”
Now, however, the Netroots, which were once thought to do to the political left what evangelical Christianity was supposed to do to the professional right, are 10 years old. In that time they vaulted Howard Dean to within a scream of the presidency, helped Democrats take both houses of Congress and several statehouses across the country, and gave the party what many in the movement believed to be some much-needed spine.
But with another critical election two weeks away, politicians, political operatives, and even the bloggers themselves say the Netroots are a whisper of what they were only four years ago, a dial-up modem in a high-speed world, and that the brigade of laptop-wielding revolutionaries who stormed the convention castle four years ago have all but disappeared as a force within the Democratic Party.
The article goes on to list quotes from Madrak, Peter Daou, and others, and when I linked this piece to DougJ I asked him- “Why do they keep interviewing the same sad sacks who have never managed to change with the times,” and he just responded “DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY.” Look, I’m sorry some of the old school of progressive bloggers have not figured out a way to monetize their websites, I really am. But hey- when you were all in for Edwards or Hillary then spent all of 2008 linking Hillaryis44 or No Quarter, hoocoodanode the current administration would be skeptical. As a side note, maybe Susie Madrak could send a thank you email the next time we send a donation from this website (which I have) or linked to her fundraising pages (which we have).
And that is what it boils down to, really. There are a group of progressives out there who are unwilling to compromise their values (bully for you), but when they find themselves outside the mainstream of both parties, still feel as if they are entitled to a living from their writing. Blogging is just like everything else, and subject to market forces. If you are selling a product no one wants to buy, it isn’t because your ideas are better and everyone else is too stupid to see the light, it’s because people don’t agree with you and don’t care to hear you.
Look- there are lots of things our progressive betters are absolutely right about. For my money, drone wars and the Obama admins behavior on the drug war both come to mind. Progressives are right. They are right about the grand bargain and cuts to medicare and social security. But here is the rub- when you spend your entire online life doing everything you can to sabotage the Democratic party (STOP PICKING ON RUSH! OBAMA COULDA HAD A PUBLIC OPTION! OBAMA HAD AN ANTIGAY SPEAKER AT HIS INAUGURATION!) because what they are doing, while light years better than what Republicans are doing, doesn’t meet your high standards, don’t be surprised when people deem you irrelevant. Don’t spend years savaging every Democrat because there was no public option and then get all confused that Chuck Schumer won’t buy a blogad.
You see it over and over again. Point to the President’s accomplishments, and mention Lily Ledbetter and the end of DADT, and the progressive response is “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY. WHAT ABOUT X and X and X? ALSO TOO, TIM GEITHNER!”
And that’s great, be an advocate for your beliefs. But why do you think your beliefs should reward you with money?
Next- there are a lot of progressive voices out there on the internet. They just haven’t tried to build themselves into a business enterprise. Every single day I read links to websites I had never heard of before, with bold, vibrant liberal commentary. Check the rec list at DKOS. When you see a commenter say something you like, click on their name and and go check out their website. The progressive blogosphere isn’t dead- it’s as vibrant as it ever was. Just the folks are different than they were ten years ago.
And most of all, if your traffic sucks, it isn’t because your readers just don’t get your particular brand of genius, it’s that they have determined you aren’t worth reading. Period. And if you can’t even build a community in your own personal sphere of the internet, just why the hell do you think your ideas are going to build an actual viable candidacy?
And I know that yes, when the Netroots started, I was a filthy Republican, and now I consider myself a proud Democrat (I never call myself a progressive though. I’m a liberal.) But I figured out how to build a community. You share things. You allow open comments. You let people speak their piece. You don’t judge, and when you do, you let people tell you why you are an asshole. You invite interesting people to write what they want, and you have a crowd of people who who care about each other even though they only know each other as black and white pixels. And you also recognize that you have to work within the system to get shit done.
This is all kind of rambling and insider baseballish, so just start flaming.
*** Update ***
And whaddya know. The Daily Beast completely misrepresented Markos, so who knows how much of this piece is trustworthy.
Talked to Susie, said she was told the interview was supposed to be about the old-style single-proprietor blogs, not the entire progressive blogosphere, so like Markos, her words were taken out of context. My apologies.
Narcissus
Since when does Daou know about progressives?
handy
Oh this thread is gonna be fun.
schrodinger's cat
Well, that’s all well and good. Now how about giving the community that you have built what they want the most, a liberal dose of Tunch. A photo or even an update will do.
BTW am I the only person who has never heard about the people mentioned in the post above?
Spaghetti Lee
so just start flaming.
Where’s the World Series thread, asshole?
PsiFighter37
Regardless of the motives for writing the article (and I’ve already written long responses on this at both GOS and Booman, which you can view here and here for more clarification on my thoughts on this piece – too lazy to copy/paste), I do think that there is a point to be made – namely that the grassroots has splintered significantly over the past 5 years, and that it’s basically become a scene where only a few can succeed now. I disagree that lower traffic means you’re not offering a product people don’t want. What happened to My Left Nutmeg, which was instrumental in beating Joe Lieberman in the primary, for example? They did a hell of a service for us. What about a lot of the other blogs?
Just my view after having been involved in the liberal blogosphere for more than 8 years across many different websites.
Corner Stone
Hmmm…
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
I haven’t either.
My comment, which was eaten, was that I really want to rant about this issue, but not 13 days before the election.
Warren Terra
Well, gee, what’s the point of writing a long comment if the damn blog crashes for no reason?ETA: managed to recover it:
Anyone who complains that things have changed on the Internet, and doesn’t bother to properly survey the new state of the Internet as it pertains to their interests, is automatically to be disregarded.
I still mourn the tragically young death of Steve Gilliard. I wish Hilzoy would be tempted back into blogging again. I pine for the loss of Molly Ivins, and she wasn’t really Of The Internet (her columns were online, through the Star-Telegram). But the sad deaths of two of those people and the blogging retirement of the other doesn’t mean that there are no liberal voices – it means they’re not the same ones, that’s all.
Yes: from what I can see, Daily Kos is a pale shadow of what it was four years ago. But this site is stronger than ever, and there are all the young turks blogging elsewhere, people I’ve never heard of and that four years from now it will be inconceivable I’d never heard of. Here at Balloon Juice, we’ve raised $80K for Obama this cycle, another several thousand for Liz Warren, and moved people to pound the pavement. And beyond gazing into our collective navel, there’s the internet writ large. There’s Obama, seeking an audience, deciding to do an AMA on Reddit. There’s the Internet collectively creating the “Horses And Bayonets” meme and riding it like a pony, before the debate’s half over.
It’s not the Internet you remember, Internet Grandad. Check out what it is, though, and you might be pleased with what you find.
Liberty60
Politics is about getting shit done- picking up the trash, fixing potholes, passing laws, and GETTING TO 50 PLUS 1.
celticdragonchick
Obama having that asshole speak at his inauguration while relegating a pro GLBT pastor to a non televised event was a stupid fucking unforced error that really sabotaged his relations with GLBT people…to say nothing of defending DOMA for a couple of years.
That being said, he has done a lot to make up for that shitty start. Anybody who wants to pout and stay home instead of supporting the President can go sit with Greenwald in Unicorn Happy Land. Fuck ’em. There is real work to do here in the real world and it starts with getting Obama another 4 years.
Baud
@Warren Terra:
Reminds me:
http://cavalrymenforromney.com/
Sarah, Proud and Tall
Fuck you, Cole. Why are you oppressing my freedom of speechiness by letting me write what I want? Bastard.
What a lot of bullshit. It boils down to “Waaaah! Not everyone agrees with me and no one is reading me anymore”. I have dozens of active, interesting lefty and leftish bloggers I read every day, at different levels of public profile, all of whom seem to be doing just fine getting their views out there…
Anyone who expects the “left blogosphere” to speak with a unified voice on anything has been huffing glue.
James E. Powell
I remember the name Peter Daou, but I don’t remember much about him. That might be because the left blogosphere is dead or it might be that he hasn’t said anything fresh or interesting lately.
I don’t follow people on the blogs; I follow conversations, debates, and deathless arguments. I go where those things can be found.
And who thought the left blogs would be the equivalent of the right-wing, church & corporate financed “evangelicals”? That’s just crazy.
booda
Great post. Interesting that in my early days of discovering the political interweb blogs, The Daou Report was always my first stop. I liked having multiple blogs from both sides all aggregated in one spot. That’s where I discovered BJ… and I thought you were a wingnut idiot. Now I agree with you about 90% of the time (We part company on the Stillers and just about every other sports team). Daou, however, has been off my radar completely since the demise of the Daou Report. Now I know why.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Awww hell no. The whiners have deserved this for years.
My only observation is that we’d all have been a lot better off if Susie Madrak had actually started throwing bricks.
ETA: I ran a blog of the liberal persuasion from 2004 until 2008. There are many reasons you’re reading this site instead of mine, but in the end the main reason is that my blog didn’t have anything to offer that anyone wanted. And that is all on me and me alone.
General Stuck
RIP Netroots
sniffle, sniff
it was too young to die.
beltane
What do Matt Stoller and Jerome Armstrong have to say about all of this?
PsiFighter37
@Warren Terra: dKos has more traffic than ever, so to say it’s a pale shadow of itself is nonsense. The problem is that it used to be the biggest fish in a small pond. It’s not a bigger fish, but it’s swimming in a lake or an ocean (in 2004, there was no Twitter or open-access Facebook, and YouTube was a newfangled tool).
Agreed that BJ appears to be stronger than ever. I didn’t read it back when the blog proprietor was on the dark side, but there’s no doubt this site, in particular, is as popular as it’s ever been since I started reading it regularly several years back.
John Cole
@celticdragonchick:
Not fucking this again. Will you ever admit you were just fucking wrong on this issue?
The Bobs
I started reading blogs with TPM before 9/11. Things have certainly changed a lot, but I think the group blogs like this one and LGM are the go to places now. In many cases this year the liberal blogs pushed stories like the 47% that the media wanted to ignore. They made a real difference this year, much more so than last time.
The “horses and bayonets” line likely came out of a comment thread at LGM. I think much of the rhetoric on the war on women came from the liberal blogosphere. I also don’t think there would be as much fact checking done on Mitt without the blogs driving it.
The best blogs, like this one, have a very well informed and educated commentariat. It’s really been a pleasure to see it develop. You have all taught me so much.
Sad But True
I guess when you punch the hippies, they respond by punching your hamsters?
Anyway, from my skim of the article, I have a much different take. It doesn’t exactly gloss over the success stories (TPM, Greenwald, Kos). And its pov is actually not so harsh given that it’s published by the people who used to bring you Newsweek.
Anyway, I think your post gives short shrift to observations like this:
PsiFighter37
@beltane: Apparently Jerome Armstrong is working for Gary Johnson (figures, since he always classified himself as a libertarian first). He was always in it to get paid, so I was never a big fan of Jerome. I have no idea what Stoller does professionally now, but he looks to be quite the firebagger from what I can tell on my Facebook feed.
@Sad But True: This is a good point – moneybombs used to be pretty damn effective, and it really helped get ActBlue off the ground. Nowadays, it’s really just a drop in the bucket compared to the UNLIMITED CORPORATE CASH! that’s floating around.
The Bobs
Also, funny!@Warren Terra: Happened to me too. I recovered as well.
John Cole
@booda: The Daou report was great, and he also had a blog dedicated to covering the UN called the UN Dispatch which was also really good and which I promoted heavily. But since then, he has just seemed to go crazy. Every time I read one of his tweets I think of the sensitive guy from Bedazzled.
Warren Terra
@PsiFighter37:
I don’t visit terribly often. When I do, I don’t find the same energy, the same quality writing, the same experiences being conveyed, either in the front-pagers or in the Rec List. And, according to the ActBlue thermometer on the front page last time I visited, their fundraising has been anemic.
I didn’t always agree with the consensus at DKos, but I always found things I liked if I looked around a bit. The last few times I visited, this just wasn’t the case, and the community looked tired. But that’s just my anecdotal impression; I’m glad to hear that in fact their traffic is up and their people enthused.
John Cole
@Sad But True: Excellent point.
Cain
@James E. Powell:
The Daou Report is how I found this blog. I owe peter daou that much.
Litlebritdifrnt
All I know is that when my cat had a broken leg and I reached out to the people of this wonderful community they came to my aid in spades and helped me get his surgery paid for. I cannot say enough about how the wonderful people of this blog are willing to step up to the plate when we have an issue that needs financial contributions to help critters. Simply there is no better community on the internet. Period.
Yutsano
@Sarah, Proud and Tall: Why oh why oh why does no one remember Will Rogers? He was well aware of us way back since FDR.
RaflW
John G Cole you’re …
.
right on.
Really, nothing to flame about. Now lets go win for that public-option hating, late-to-the-gay-wedding, bankster-friend Obama.
Because he’s doing pretty darn OK in a totally insane world.
Poicephalus
I used to confuse Susie w/ Marcy (Empty) Wheeler.
I don’t anymore.
Emptywheel has gained quite a reputation.
Whether or not she can monetize that,
I wouldn’t know.
Best wishes to your Pops, JC.
joel hanes
I have been reading Susie Madrak for almost ten years.
If you google her byline, I think you’ll see that her recent contributions to other blogs are substantial, well-written, and reporterly.
That should be no surprise — unless I’m mistaken, she was a working print journalist for decades, an actual reporter, and one who lives and breathes the press’s traditional adversarial role (now largely abandoned).
I wonder if Daou isn’t confusing the issue somewhat.
Like many others (e.g. Will Bunch, Jon Talton) Susie has often mourned the death of the print media industries that for so long was home to adversarial and investigative journalism, and the paid reporter jobs it used to provide. I don’t think she ever expected to have to make a living blogging, nor have I seen her complain that blogging doesn’t pay.
She’s been trying for years to land a regular reporter/journalist job somewhere, but damned few such exist, and fewer for a woman late in mid-life, with health problems. That, she complains about.
Cain
@John Cole:
Couldn’t leave that comment alone could ya? Good job, dude now that’s all we are going to be fucking talking about. Re-opening the butthurt. yay.
General Stuck
Oh, and btw. Teh “Grand Bargain” has about as much chance of becoming reality, as I do flying to the moon. Unless democrats don’t have the shear numbers to stop it. It is called doing politics, and strategy to trap your opponent and make hay from their intransigence. In this case, the insane and dangerous pledge to never raise taxes. It is some risky as a messaging matter, but you won’t win curling up into an ideological ball and refuse to play. Obama took a risk getting OBL, and is doing the same with the GB. Too break the nutters fever, as it were.
PsiFighter37
Fuck it, for ease’s sake, this is what I think (reposted from dKos):
—–
Daily Kos is bigger and better than ever, but it’s largely because Markos (props to him) had the foresight to develop it into a sustainable business model. But a lot of prominent blogs that were around several years ago – MyDD, Pandagon, Billmon (I know he shows up occasionally, but still) – they are all gone. Even FireDogLake is basically a shell of what it used to be; the only thing I can tell that gets any sort of respectable attention is TBogg’s page.
The blogosphere was highly unified because we wanted to give Democrats some spine and the party had a record of performing like total shit in the 2002 and 2004 elections. We helped give them spine, in a collective effort. Who helped get Paul Hackett national attention? We did – but along with local bloggers in Ohio who highlighted what a great candidate he was. Who drove Ned Lamont’s Senate bid? The blogosphere, but with the help of My Left Nutmeg and other local Connecticut bloggers. Where are those regional blogs now?
They’re basically dead.
That’s not to say that there aren’t other blogs that aren’t well-frequented. Atrios still gets his audience at Eschaton; Balloon Juice has become a huge favorite of mine over the years (and where I usually bother to post nowadays), and even a couple smaller blogs like Booman Tribune still have a tight-knit, loyal community that visits. And some, like TPM, have basically become liberal-leaning news aggregators. But it’s far less than it was in the mid-2000s. And a lot of it does (yes, it’s true) have to do with the 2008 primary. That splintered the show of unity the blogosphere held in the face of Bush’s 2nd term, and a lot of people took their ball home and never came back when Obama won. And that, ultimately, is the problem…Daily Kos is meant to elect Democrats, so it’s pretty damn easy to make sure people cowboy up and support whoever was selected in the primary. But the vast majority of the blogs didn’t have that same electoral interest.
I don’t think it’s fair to say the liberal blogosphere is in decline…because it declined quite a while ago from its peak. And while Daily Kos has maybe never had more page views, if you’re an old-timer – look through your old blogrolls that you may have had, click on a link, and see if anyone still participates at all.
Warren Terra
@beltane, @PsiFighter37:
If you really want to know what Stoller’s been up to lately, here you go. It ain’t pretty. “Firebagger” would be a generous assessment.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
uh…. huh. you made me click on a Daily Beast link to see who wrote this, and I don’t recognize the name. I don’t think I’ll miss his future work.
TDB also had a column today (yeah, I fell for the link bait) by Michelle Cottle, whom I usually like, stating that Obama’s big meanie sarcasm at the last debate opened a lot of old wounds for “Hillaryland”. Every quote in the article was from Whitman (IIRC) Ayres, a former Bush II pollster. So I guess “Democrats in disarray” was Tina Brown’s order of the day.
Brantl
@John Cole: Apparently, not.
General Stuck
The Daou Report blog Aggregator was my mainstay, and where I first heard that a disaffected republican was going off the wingnut reservation. I started reading BJ then, but didn’t comment for another couple years.
RedKitten
@booda:
Ditto. I miss the Daou Report. It was great being able to get that snapshot of what people were saying.
Plus, it’s what led me here. :)
And yes, things have changed. Heck, John Cole and Charles Johnson were hardline right-wingers back then, with Charles being completely batshit. There were a lot of players who aren’t around anymore. Times change, people come and go.
That’s just life. It’s like going back to your old university to visit, 3 years after graduating, and being sad because they’ve torn down one of the old dorms and your favourite prof has retired.
The world is moving on…you either live in the past, or live in the now.
BettyPageisaBlonde
I’ve never understood why “butthurt” has such a negative connotation. For the record, anal is fun!
Oh, wait. This isn’t Butt-Juice, is it? Sorry. Y’all get on with your terribly entertaining infighting.
Also, John Cole, I love you. Asshole.
:)
DPS
Whoa, you’re not kidding: they misrepresented the fuck out of what Markos said.
Hawes
O oooo ooooooo Read my blog!
dmsilev
@John Cole: Daou worked for the Hillary campaign, and like some of her fervent advocates hasn’t seemed to have forgiven Obama for winning that primary.
Spaghetti Lee
Well, blogging itself is dying, isn’t it? At least that’s what all the Hip Now People keep saying. If you’ve got something to say and can’t fit it on Twitter or Facebook, it apparently ain’t worth saying. What a werld, what a werld.
trollhattan
The Detroit who? SF looking dominant so far.
Carry on.
redshirt
I have a dark secret: I got my unicorn. I named him B-Rock.
Cacti
Vaulted Howard Dean to within a scream of the Presidency?
In what fictional universe did this happen.
mai naem
@James E. Powell: Wasn’t Peter Daou Hillary’s internet liason to Netroots?
Anyway – I don’t know if anybody used to go to Roger Ailes – not the Fox guy,(http://rogerailes.blogspot.com/2012/10/and-god-said-let-their-be-rape.html) the liberal guy who has the blog. I used read his blog and it seemed like he was posting less and less(I think he had health issues) and then not at all. Well, I happened to go there last week and he’s back. Anyway – I just wanted to give a shout out for one of my favorite blogs. Also too, I miss Billmon.
Oh, and BTW the progressive blogosphere is alive and well – it’s just harder to break into because the good blogging real estate is all bought up.
Cacti
@trollhattan:
Unlike football, a long layoff is not your friend in baseball.
dmsilev
@mai naem: Billmon has posted stuff, occasionally, to dKos in recent months.
Spaghetti Lee
I know next to nothing about the history of lefty blogging, so maybe someone can confirm or deny this. Could it be that the loss of Bush and his goons as a common cause to fight against is a primary cause of people drifting away and disappearing? Inversely, isn’t rightblogging bigger than it was before 2008? I’m not much for dates and names, but there seems to be a lot more stupid (volume-wise) on that front in during the O presidency.
Maybe political bloggers need a common enemy to keep the energy going. If the Republicans get back in power maybe that would re-energize the lefty blogs, although that wouldn’t be much of a silver lining at that point.
Yutsano
@redshirt: Twilight is skeptical of your claims. And she actually is a unicorn.
Hal
Having flashbacks to the seeming hundreds of comments invoking the phrase “under the bus.” I think every diarist on Kos had tire marks on them as far as they were concerned.
redshirt
@Yutsano: Twilight and B-Rock should hook up. The world needs more unicorns.
gex
@John Cole: I would get there a sometimes. One of the things this blog has offered me is a chance to grow. There are so many great voices here, both on the front page and in the comments.
The only thing I really dislike about this blog is me when I get too hotheaded and lose my shit. That is, as they say, on me.
ETA: Oh, and I found this place from Sullivan’s. And my God, what an unbelievable upgrade.
Corner Stone
@Spaghetti Lee: An equally plausible suggestion is that issues people on the “left” used to universally agree were wrong and worth fighting for became trite to a number of bloggers and their respective readers.
Baud
@Hal:
Me too! I think it’s interesting to compare how the blogs reacted to Obama’s perceived betrayals versus how conservatives have completely bought into Romney’s etch-a-sketching in order to get him elected.
Redshift
@dmsilev: I’ll have to check that out. I never missed a post at the Whiskey Bar.
General Stuck
I got yer Mittmentum right here.
booda
@RedKitten:
Exactly! My personal ‘daily reads’ have changed many times since then and continue to do so. Charlie Pierce is my latest blog crush and I almost never visit DKos anymore. Not because I have any particular issue with the GOS, but just because it’s not in the rotation at the moment and it can be a bit overwhelming in terms of the sheer number of diaries and postings. I have to be more selective now that I have a job and such.
El Cid
Before there was the internet (or at least the widely used internet) there were leftist bookstores and magazines etc and they aren’t as influential as they used to be (and that’s a very limited amount in any case, though the Nation outsold the New Republic but mattered not for the hivemind media).
But you can now find a lot of the information and at least some degree of the perspectives you found in those sources in the broader blogosphere.
And now there has been a degree of specialization — I don’t come here for in-depth analysis of international affairs or theoretical views on labor organizing, because why would I?
So I’m not sure I see the fall from grace others do, though I do get that something, a brief sense of unity, has been lost.
Jay from Oklahoma
Wow I usually read without commenting but I loved this post so much! Shorter version: Don’t be a sanctimonious prick.
joel hanes
Here is Susie Madrak’s piece today on Crooks and Liars.
Just Some Fuckhead
ThinkProgress does pretty well for a non-pet blog.
Anya
Oh, “real progressives”. Will you ever stop feeding the corporate media’s insatiable appetite for “democrats in disarray” stories ?
Sad But True
@John Cole:
You may recall that he was Hillary’s “senior online advisor” during the 2008 primary. Which leads to another of the key observations in the article: how the netroots fractured during that spring and summer. And, naturally, it being trolly Daily Beast and all, the article suggests (with huge assists from Madrak and Daou) that this was all Obama’s fault.
Obama is not blameless by any means, but it seemed pretty obvious at the time that Clinton conducted her campaign in a fashion that was bound to sow discord among progressives. The race was effectively over long before she withdrew, and only the possibility of undemocratic, insulting hijinks (Michigan! SuperDelegates!) and race-based hysteria, along with a media DESPERATE for a horserace (oh, how things have changed, huh?) could even delay the inevitable Obama victory. But what they COULD and DID do, was fracture the base. Obama has made numerous decisions that were bound to divide liberals anyway, but it started there, and more than a few bloggers (not necessarily Madrak or Daou) never recovered from their bitter, obsessive hatred of Obama.
muddy
@RedKitten:
slag
You’re more than a little too bullish about market forces here. Also, you set up a false dichotomy. Lots of people don’t agree with lots of stuff, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those people aren’t also too stupid. Apply your self-righteousness to cases in which you were in the minority and right and others were in the majority and wrong, and you’ll see how quickly it falls apart.
That said, I kind of agree with the rest of your point, so whatev.
Just Some Fuckhead
My favorite site back in the day before mainstream blogs was BushAWOL.com. Then it up and went AWOL.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Anya:
It isn’t clear to me who is to blame for the genre, “real progressives” or the corporate media.
Evolving Deep Southerner
I guess the most illustrative thing about the left blogosphere are the numbers of right-bloggers who, attracting an intelligent commentariat, have done a 180. Mr. Cole, your conversion was before my time, but I a latter-day analog of that conversation I did get to witness was Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs. It’s funny how Johnson turned so suddenly and completely, and now, not that many months from it, he’s averaging 300-400+ posts a thread, regardless of topic.
Which leads to the question: Why the fuck is LGF averaging that many comments per thread, even including nothingshit threads, and Balloon-Juice never approaches that except on outlier threads where everybody’s fucking pissed and fighting?
Sad But True
@Cacti: Dean was fading during that primary, but still looked like the candidate to beat in 04 until the morning when every media outlet decided to replay the “scream” over and over and over again.
danielx
@Warren Terra:
Amen. I’d add Billmon, Media Whores Online (motto: we set out to bring the media to their knees and found out they were already there), and The Editors of The Poor Man Institute, who managed to bring tears of laughter to my eyes on a regular basis.
I think Susie Madrak is great, as is Thers, and Digby, and a host of others. But there are only so many hours in the day available for reading blogs, and I tend to gravitate towards those with extended commentary. (The Stiftung Leo Strauss, anyone? Anybody?)
But it’s a different world than it was back then, if you actually want to make money from blogging these days you’d better have a damn good business plan and offer something that people want to read. If it’s purely a labor of love, which some of my personal faves these days are (TBogg, Driftglass and Doghouse Riley to name three), you’re free to do absolutely whatever you want. But blogging is hard. It’s difficult to write something every day that people want to read, and there are many, many talented and not-so-talented people out there doing the same thing for free. Note: there used to be a relatively limited number of people who got paid for writing for the public every day. These people were called journalists.
I’ve heard bitching about how many front pagers there are at this fine location, but it would be difficult for Cole to keep up this site on his own and produce enough commentary to keep people coming back while holding down a full time position for the important stuff, like keeping Tunch in cat food.
There aren’t many people out there as talented (and lucky) as Charles Pierce, who, be it noted, started writing as a reporter and sports columnist. You can make a living as a blogger. It can be done, as Kos and others have shown, but it’s difficult and more so if you’re a liberal/progressive/whatever, because people with major money generally subscribe to the conservative point of view (whatever the hell that is nowadays). And more difficult now than it was ten years ago…
Which sort of answers the question of why people like Susie Madrak scrape to keep body and soul in one piece while Megan McArdle, to name one of a host, makes six figures a year as an apologist (and a half-assed, not very good one at that) for Wall Street, the for-profit healthcare industry and any number of other entities and individual rich pigfuckers.
some guy
Fire Geithner, then indict, convict, and imprison him. Anybody stupid enough to admit to a felony on page A1 of the NY Times deserves to do some time.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
LGF has built a community. No one understands Balloon Juice’s brand of genius.
Cacti
@Hal:
My favorite was reformed right wing bastard Ed Schultz calling the POTUS a sell-out.
Recovering lushes make such obnoxious teetotalers.
gex
@El Cid: That sense is probably very common with the people who start anything up when it gets bigger and as time passes.
Cacti
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Nah, we’re just a bunch of cranks who don’t fit in everywhere else.
Cassidy
I haven’t read the thread yet, but this makes BJ stand above others.
JWR
Peter Daou, Taylor Marsh, FDL and the whole Obama/Clinton primary obsession were the reason I said goodbye to doing online stuff for a few years. BJ is the first blog I’ve actually commented on in a very long time, and for that I thank you.
piratedan
well its the invisible hand…. and all that… the thing is, I still bop around a bit. I frequent here, DKos (Baja Kossacks Unite!) and over at LGF. While I bemoan our losses, there are still good voices to link to (Charlie over at Esquire) big and small (http://www.stonekettle.com/) that bespeak reason and scathing commentary. I have to believe that there will be in the future.
as always, thanks for the forum JC and for the snark and pics and access to some very thought provoking peeps.
joel hanes
@mai naem:
Yes, (the good) Roger Ailes is worth reading.
Other older leftish blogs still good after all these years :
Seeing The Forest
The Reality-Based Community
Brad Delong
Balkinization
The Left Coaster
One of the best progressive-activist blogs is Howie Klein’s Down With Tyranny, which IMHO just keeps getting better and better.
Too little read (perhaps because there’s no comments) is Scott Horton’s No Comment blog at Harpers.
Baud
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
I’d prefer not to put any more strain on the servers, thank you very much.
Cassidy
I miss Jane of Jay and Jane. Jay was a prick.
PsiFighter37
@Baud: I don’t think LGF puts up as many threads in a day. I don’t read it that closely because Charles Johnson doesn’t really do a hell of a lot of analysis (and I like reading what the insight of the FPers is), but if they leave one thread up, they can add up to a bunch of comments.
I prefer how it’s done here.
Just Some Fuckhead
One of my first blog crushes was James Wolcott. I can’t remember why I stopped reading but it didn’t have anything to do with any of John’s vaunted theories on successful bloghosting. I think I just got tired of trying to decipher those weird little HTML squigglies that permeated his documents or maybe he didn’t update the blog for a few days and I moved on.
Jay from OK
Peter Dauo reminds me of those people who are always complaining about how there aren’t as many record stores around as when we were young, man.
If the “netroots” is dead, it’s only because (a) the internet has taken over the world, rendering the concept of netroots kind of anachronistic, and (b) the activist base is slowly but surely taking over the Democratic party.
PeakVT
@Evolving Deep Southerner: Different crowds interact in different ways. Don’t worry about.
Also, too, some sites have better formatted comments that don’t need jammed through a half-dozen greasemonkey scripts to be made readable.
Anya
@Just Some Fuckhead: I am very familiar with “Real Progressives.” My BFF from college is the realest of them all. She’s always posting in her facebook, stuff about what a corporate sellouts Obama and the dems are, to the point that I blocked her news feed. She spends more time griping about the awfulness of the democrats than she talks about republicans. Although, to be fair, every now and then a republican douchebag would say something really racist and she gets angry about it and donates to Obama. Last time, it was when Mittens made that stupid birther “joke” in Michigan. I think she maxed out to the campaign.
To make a long story short, corporate media will always work very hard to present the dems in the worst light. But our whiny progressives always come to the rescue and present them with actual people they can put on teevee or quote in their shallow pieces.
Soonergrunt
I came here because at the time that things were disintegrating over at the orange place into the puritans and the realists and things there were just nuts, a couple of different writers there quoted things that John had written over here. I came over to check it out. I never left, and haven’t posted anything at Kos in a very long time.
The fact that John honored me with the keys, on Anne Laurie’s suggestion was something I never saw coming.
I don’t know that I really contribute a lot, and God knows that there’s some serious intellectual firepower among the other front pagers, and this is still the first place that comes up from a Google search for “skull fuck a kitten.” Even if I didn’t have the keys this is my home.
Gian
ahh the good old days of mediawhoresonline and bartcop.com
(bart’s still posting but not as much, not sure he has his health, and he really was one of the first, back in the clinton ers that blog was something like limbaughthelying naziwhore)
John Cole
@Evolving Deep Southerner: Count how many posts he has a day. Then count the number here.
Haydnseek
To borrow from the late, lamented Frank Zappa: “it’s not dead, it just smells funny.”
karen marie
@joel hanes: I’m surprised to hear that Madrak is/was a journalist. Back in the first Bush II admin I visited Crooks & Liars daily, but as time went on I discovered much better writing and a far superior grasp of issues elsewhere. Way too much hysteria over very small piles of beans there, and very badly written, especially her stuff.
John Mc.
This post is a good example of why I check this blog several times daily. Introspective and critical analysis, coupled with humour, some snark, and a big dose of reality. Also too, Updates. I like Madrak, and C&L is my go to daily, But BJ is more better, less hysteria, good writing, and of course, Tunch and Doug J.
Cassidy
@John Cole: Get crackin’.
HobbesAI
@Yutsano: Mr Obama’s inauguration as President took place on January 20, 2009. The ponies didn’t arrive until October 10, 2010. I didn’t mind the wait; I could see he was busy.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@John Cole: I’m not dogging you out, John. Just an observation. No, I’ve never counted the number of threads over there a day. I’m not there every day, but I reckon I need to go over there every day and count threads before I comment further.
I do come here every day. So there’s that. And as anecdotal evidence, I don’t post much, so I don’t guess I’m carrying my weight if the number of comments is a legitimate measure of support.
Sheesh.
ETA: The number-of-comments comment was really an aside to the point I was trying to make, poorly, apparently. That is, it’s amazing how right-wing trogs, the intelligent ones, will change their minds wholesale if they’re open to legitimate challenges from their commentors. And they apparently keep said commentors – and gain more – by doing so. I’m sure there may be comparable left-to-right blog shifts, but I wouldn’t know, ’cause I avoid righty blogs. If something isn’t making me feel smarter, I don’t have time for it. There’s too much shit to read in the world.
joel hanes
@karen marie:
Interesting.
I had thought Susie a fairly recent addition to the roster of C&L frontpagers, maybe in 2009 or 2010.
Ah. Her Linked-In profile says she joined C&L in Dec 2008.
kc
“But I figured out how to build a community. You share things. You allow open comments. You let people speak their piece. You don’t judge, and when you do, you let people tell you why you are an asshole”
Also, too: Tunch.
NobodySpecial
The “Third Way” Democratic Party needed sabotaging, something quite easily forgotten in the victories of 2008. Unless, of course, you LIKED having Republican ideas wrapped in a nice blanket of Democratic Party.
ranchandsyrup
Firebloggers are funny. They all seem to believe they’re principled and care about results but it’s really about the grift. The ones that “make it” to be used as a cudgel for the right get more than they bargained for. Like Juan Williams. Or are irrelevant like Mickey Kaus.
MikeJ
@Gian:
Didn’t he also go a bit nuts in ’08? I was a big fan back in the day though. Went to the meetup at Carville’s restaurant.
karen marie
@joel hanes: That makes sense actually as that was about when it started going down the tubes in terms of any quality at all.
John Cole
@Evolving Deep Southerner: I didn’t think you were dogging me at all. Just when this website had fewer posts a day, there were more comments in each post. Now, we have so many posters that some day the posts seem to scroll by like my twitter feed.
redshirt
@John Cole: Have you ever thought about a comment ranked based front page? Where, for example, whatever post that day was just commented on appears at the top of the page? Each day starts anew.
Or, monkeys?
The prophet Nostradumbass
@MikeJ: I just took a look at that bartcop site for the first time in years, and damn, I have no idea what the guy’s talking about. The site looks like something produced by a kook, circa 1997.
Gian
@MikeJ: yes, although “a little” may be an understatement, he was a Hillary dead ender – see the carville restaraunt thing
hitchhiker
I can’t remember how I found this place, but I know I decided to stay after I read the lexicon. (I still read the lexicon once in a while just for laughs.)
I’d forgotten all about the Daou report & how desperate I used to be for fucking information . . . boy, are those days over.
Spatula
Ummm…NO.
In many ways and for many things, I love ya Cole, but you are NOT a Liberal, not even close.
You are a Goldwater Republican, which because the Democratic party has lost its soul, is what is allowed to pass as Liberal these days.
Bruce Baugh
One thing I’d like to see talked up more is the idea that blogging is, for most people, not a long-term thing. It’s hard to be both articulate and angry – it takes a toll. If anything else comes along to add to your burden, then it can very easily be too much. But people can be very worthwhile bloggers for a few months or years and then move on, and have done a good thing for the world and not be failures at all. It’s not like it’s the only thing in life that can be great to do for a while but not necessarily be great career fodder.
Also, there’s a lot of just plain disagreement about the relative priority of these questions:
“How can we make our side in politics be the best that it can and should be?”
“How can be we best contain the other side, and allow it to do as little harm as possible?”
Those are both great questions, but they take you to different places sometimes. I like Balloon Juice precisely because the containment one looms large here, and it seems to me that it’s the crucial one – like piling up the sandbags before and during a flood, knowing that you’ll want to tend to property tax reform and other stuff once the flood settles.
Bruce Baugh
@John Cole: How much of a geek am I? In my head, Spock, in Star Trek II: “If we were do things by the book, as Lt. Cole recommends, the posts would seem like tweets.”
joel hanes
@Spatula:
I love ya Cole, but you are … a Goldwater Republican
I’d say Eisenhower Republican, like Obama.
That’s a compliment, by the way.
Goldwater was an out-and-out militarist, and a small-government low-tax crank. His saving graces were an ability to perceive reality, a streak of common sense, and bitter contempt for the God-bothering.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@joel hanes: Funny enough, Rachel Maddow has said: “I’m undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.”
kuvasz
Its not so much that the Netsroots have moven away, its that those folks have stood still.
handy
I used to go to Sadly No quite a bit, but Brad, D, Retardo, Mr. Leonard Pierce and the gang pretty much disappeared and so did most of the lulz.
Scamp Dog
Speaking of bloggers from days gone by, does anyone else remember Anonymous Liberal? Or know what he (I assume a he, but I’m not sure) is up to these days?
Spectre
“You progressives should’ve wised up and become obamacons like me and Andrew Sullivan!”
The entire post is all sorts of sleazy.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
Well, FYWP eated my comment (and I was gonna be the first, too!). In a nutshell, no flames from me. John, you really have built a community.
It’s a hang-it-all-out, scary thing to do and my hat’s off to you. No way in hell could I do the same thing.
Marc
A lot of the people who’ve fallen by the wayside also just aren’t very good writers. There was a market for long and outraged screeds in the Bush era. That time passed, and that style simply wore out its welcome. Digby is a perfect example. She was always far too wordy, and when combined with the Eeyore schtick I simply stopped paying attention. Judging from how rarely anything she writes gets linked or talked about I suspect I’m not alone.
Quite a few more simply got into a stale routine, long or short. That’s Duncan Black, for example – the guy should clearly retire, as he just repeats a few tired buzzwords.
And others simply got bitter and spend too much time nursing grudges.
Finally, we might all agree on Bush, but we don’t all agree on everything else. A fracturing of that unity was inevitable.
TheMightyTrowel
Obama on Leno. I think he’s the highest profile politician I’ve ever heard say something this true about women’s bodily autonomy.
auntieeminaz
@Scamp Dog: Yes! I have missed him. Wonder what happened to him.
pseudonymous in nc
We don’t expect authors to publish forever. We certainly don’t expect authors to publish forever on the schedule that high-profile blogging now seems to demand, and since web years are like dog years, the burnout kicks in faster, and the lifecycle of mailing lists kicks in.
I miss Gilliard and hilzoy and Billmon and the Poor Man and the originals at S, N!, but I also miss (in a way) MWO and Bartcop and that proto-political-blog era. I miss the days when TPM was an investigative site and not a higher-end content mill, though I’m glad that Josh and his team are making a business out of it, and I think the new Prime thing might be a way to push back against the HuffPo inclination. And I miss the initial soar of FDL and a time when Greenwald wasn’t interminable. But I’ve learned not to make demands of people who create stuff.
(Pay $3/mo for NSFWCorp. Give Moe Tkacik some coin. Support Andrea Seabrook’s DecodeDC. Subscribe to publications that commit journalism. If the free-as-in-beer press is happy playing touch football with Mittens, then make sure the people doing good work can pay their rent, whether they’re writing bylined pieces or blogging, because there’s no real equivalent to the wingnut welfare gravy train.)
@joel hanes:
Agreed, and I’m guilty of that.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Soonergrunt: You and Dennis G are two of the reasons that BJ is on the top of my list every day. About the time I got here I started to see some GOS nyms I recognized.
I guess we’re just a splinter group at heart. The People’s Front of Judea. Or was that the Judean People’s Front? Maybe the Judean Popular People’s Front? Popular Front of Judea?
Chris Grrr™
@kc: Yes. It’s a fatal mistake to underestimate Tunch’s appeal.
pogu
Scamp Dog: Seconded. I just checked that site recently, thinking that maybe there was an update there.
Re: Digby. Atrios still links sometimes. “What Digby Said” is a feature. I still read both of them.
I think a lot of the “smaller” bloggers I read back in 2005-2007 went on to greener pastures. Ezra Klein did not always blog for the big boys, for instance. Yglesias… tbogg before firedoglake (unless I’m imagino-remembering that one).
I’d have to look back at some old saved bookmarks (pre-RSS) to remember what else was out there.
I miss billmon too. Per the rec above, I visited dkos. As others have said, that’s rare for me these days.
John Cole
@Spatula:
Where does this shit even come from? I am pro-choice, anti death penalty, pro legalization, and ALWAYS HAVE BEEN, even as a Republican.
I am pro gay rights, but my position has evolved. As a Republican I favored civil unions and just getting the government out of the marriage business, now I am firmly in the pro gay marriage coalition.
I am for more regulations, more taxes, and in favor of government spending to increase domestic consumption and production and to spur economic growth.
I am pro-union, pro Medicare, pro Social Security, pro Medicaid.
I am against the drone wars, torture, and further military adventurism.
Goldwater was against the Civil Rights Act, a union basher, and an ardent opponent of the New Deal.
The notion that I am a “Goldwater Republican” is, at this point, fucking laughable. I am a liberal. I may be a little too pragmatic for my progressive purist betters, but I am to the left on every major issue, social or economic, than 90% of the country.
You just don’t know what the fuck you are talking about.
Steeplejack
@joel hanes:
Agreed.
NotMax
At first I thought this was an attempt at parodying Mitt’s ‘47% and their stubborn, ingrained sense of entitlement’ comments.
Then I realized it was meant seriously.
And that’s tres scary, as there is barely a sliver of light between the two rants.
Also too, the only thing monolithic about the so-called ‘progressive blogosphere’ was unity in opposing Bush, IMHO. Which was (and is) a Good Thing.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@John Cole: John, Spatula is all about disrupting threads, nothing more or less. No matter the subject, it will find a way of dropping a bomb into a thread to derail it. Think back to what it said during the Jerry Sundasky trial.
Another Halocene Human
@celticdragonchick: It wasn’t an unforced error, except maybe on Rick Warren’s part, because he’ll have an uphill battle seeking wingnut welfare now.
Obama was keeping his enemies closer. Anyone seriously involved in GLBT activism knew what Obama had privately promised them… and Obama frigging delivered.
Warren was not a politician. Obama tried to bring a number of Republican politicians into his administration and most of them went running for the hills.
You can’t snipe from the outside when you’re on the inside.
FlipYrWhig
Wait, there are people who were popular in a sub genre of a medium in 2002, and they are no longer as popular now? That _does_ require soul-searching and complicated explanations. For starters, let’s ask Fred Durst and Calista Flockhart.
NotMax
Maybe the problem stems from there being so many fewer newspapers than there were in 1917.
/snark
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@NotMax: Heh. Good one.
Another Halocene Human
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: The comments here are better.
Come for the TUNCH, stay for the comments.
GOS has good diaries but I find the comments there to be a frustrating waste of time.
Another Halocene Human
@handy: Yeah, what happened? Nobody posts threads anymore but Cerb and the lulz in the comments have vanished. Don’t even get good trolls and even the parody trolls are tired. You don’t even get a good POOP or PENIS post any more. It’s all chit-chat, like Atrios’ comments.
Maybe the funneh people went back to Wonkette, was bound to happen (a lot of people left with Newell and the old commenting system). I was all Worthly Wokett Skum –> World O’ Crap –> Sadly, No –> Wonkette (Rebecca!)
AngryBlakGuy is back, btw.
dance around in your bones
For various personal reasons (like living in Baja w/o an Internet connection until about 2007) I came late to the blogosphere. I started out reading DKos and Crooks and Liars and Andrew Sullivan during the late Bush years, and it was such a comfort to know that I had fellow travelers in my
dislikehatred of the guy.It was actually through Andrew Sullivan that I found Balloon Juice, and it has become my home (even if I don’t comment all that much). JGC has truly created a community of intelligent, compassionate, funny as hell people and such a variety of front pagers that it just never gets boring.
I love the variety and the range of topics – usually when I watch “the news” on the TV machine, I have already read about it on Balloon Juice, and in a far more informative way. I read a few other blogs, but BJ is my home page and where I spend the most amount of time that I have in between changing poopy grandkid diapers and keeping the 3 boys from killing each other in the playroom.
Thank you falletinme be mice elf, JG!
Another Halocene Human
@PsiFighter37: I don’t think LGF puts up as many threads in a day. I don’t read it that closely because Charles Johnson doesn’t really do a hell of a lot of analysis (and I like reading what the insight of the FPers is), but if they leave one thread up, they can add up to a bunch of comments.
But half the comments are trolling. They seem to rely on downdinging instead of hounding and running off their trolls, even when said trolls are sitting there writing apologies for Jerry Sandusky and ViolentAcrez. There is plenty of good stuff in the comments but the amount of trolling and responses to the trolls (to be fair, a certain troll posts dozens of times per thread all on his own) kind of reduces the signal to noise ratio.
Another Halocene Human
@some guy: I kept thinking Obama was just giving Timmeh the rope to hang himself, but apparently there isn’t enough rope in the world or the hangmen have all caught a dread disease and can’t do the job, which is probably true because did you see that financial fraud case that got tossed at Grand Jury because it was too complicated for a jury to follow or some weak shit like that?
dance around in your bones
This is prolly a better version of Thank You live on Soul Train.
Gawd DAMN!
Another Halocene Human
@Sad But True: Obama has made numerous decisions that were bound to divide liberals anyway, but it started there, and more than a few bloggers (not necessarily Madrak or Daou) never recovered from their bitter, obsessive hatred of Obama.
Who are these people? I don’t understand this. Clinton is a Conservadem, except on ladybits issues, which made her a good match at State, almost the perfect job for her, really. Seriously, though. I wasn’t voting for Miz Censorship and I really didn’t see why so many Dems thought a Clinton was so electable. Thinking about the Clinton presidency (of which she took an active part) makes me want to shower. In terms of trade policy alone nothing Obama has done has come anywhere close to Clinton ‘lemme go vomit real quick and come back to you’ territory. And I’m not talking about NAFTA.
Sure, Obama ain’t the Maoist revolutionary some of y’all were looking for, but I just don’t get this HIIRARII mania. AFAIC, another John Kerry. I’m glad she’s not president.
Obama deserves mad, mad props as a campaigner for beating the well-funded, well-oiled Clinton machine. Seeing their campaign people on tv whining about everything Obama does warms the cockles of my cold, stony heart.
He probably saved the Democratic Party. No lie.
I fear for what happens in 2016.
Steeplejack
@dance around in your bones:
Just wanted to let you know I appreciated your post and listened to that song before trundling off to bed (in a little bit).
ETA: Gotta take it down a bit with some late-night jazz. Pharoah Sanders, “Astral Traveling.”
Yutsano
@Another Halocene Human: We get a Kirsten Gillenbrand or a Brian Schweitzer. Could you imagine a Democratic President from MONTANA??
dance around in your bones
@Steeplejack: I will be Astral Traveling off to bed tonight thanks to you :)
You bring so much to this blog with your knowledge of music, movies and TV machine finds. You are one of this community I enjoy the most.
Kerry Reid
This is pretty much all I think anyone needs to know about Susie Madrak.
Steeplejack
@dance around in your bones:
Thanks, you are too kind. Now let’s get upstairs and marvel at Ladyfriend’s cleavagenous display. I may stay up later for this.
Kerry Reid
@karen marie: I have been told numerous times (sometimes by Susie herself) that she was a real journalist, but she somehow has never gotten around to providing links to her output from her dead-tree days. Her shameful “you treat me like the slut under the bleachers” performance on the conference call with Axelrod right before the 2010 midterms pretty much encapsulates her solipsism and arrested development. And again, there is this, where she completely misrepresents — to the point of journalistic malpractice — somebody who knows what the fuck they’re talking about. And when called on it, she falls into her usual Poor Poor Pitiful Me routine about “anonymous cowards” and such.
dance around in your bones
@Steeplejack:
I think she is now regretting having spoken up – not to mention allowing her cleavage to be revealed.
BAD Cole! BAD Cole!
priscianusjr
@Spaghetti Lee:
priscianusjr
@Another Halocene Human: I agree with everything you say here. Except the part about John Kerry, I would greatly prefer him to Hillary as president. Also I would say that the Clintons, both Hillary and Bill, perform a lot better as members of the Obama team.
Raven
I was just reflecting on this downstream. I got banned by FDL and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me blogwise.
Gregory
@Warren Terra:
Oh, yes.
Considering that the lefty blogosphere formed in part in response to a hefty online presence from the right (like, when Instapundit was the major presence), and has developed into a vital and diverse community, where’s the Newsweak concern trolling about the state of the righty blogosphere?
arguingwithsignposts
@Just Some Fuckhead:
It involves unreachable databases and quadruple repeat posts. And a cat.
BruceFromOhio
@Sad But True: Late to the thread, but this tracks with my experience. In 2004 and 2006, it was the Bush empire repeatedly shitting on everything it touched that united a lot of people, inspired and enraged enough of them to put up the URL and start typing.
The blog riots that happened during the Dem primaries pried open the fractures, and those rifts haven’t really closed. FireDogLake was irreplaceable during the Scooter Libby trial with EmptyWheel’s detailed reporting and analysis … but when the wind shifted, the scent changed, and the hounds bounded off in a direction I couldn’t follow. It’s not specific to lefty blogs, though:
Behold, Redstate, Little Green Footballs, Daily Caller, Breitbart. Drudge, that fucking cockroach, provides the other bookend – that ratfucker’s rag will never die because its still a first stop-jump point to shit like the 3am Girls. QED.
Halcyan
Not everyone and not always. But mostly. This. Up here in Washington, I listen to AM 1090 Progressive Radio. I love me some Stephanie Miller in the morning, and Randi Rhodes after 6 pm. But most of the time my ride home is during Norman Goldman hours, and it’s a contest each day to see how long I can listen before I either turn the radio completely off, or switch to NPR on the FM dial.
He was one of the haters in 2010. I hold him and those like him responsible for the wave of tea partiers’ hostile takeover of the gubmint. He used words like betrayal to describe Obama. Yes, the man did not do everything he had intended to do. But he was working hard and he had a LOT of shit to deal with, and he was on our side.
No one is perfect and no one agrees with me 100% of the time except myself, and even then maybe not always. We don’t have to be perfect. We have to be effective. It is neither prudent nor effective to blow every bit of your political capital on purity of progressivity.
The other thing that Obama had and did was a belief that he could help change politics by staunching the ugliness, by working together. He said he was going to do that, and he did try to do that. I think he said that was his biggest failing – not recognizing that they simply were never going to willingly allow him any success whatsoever, regardless the cost to the country.
I love Obama. I see him working ever so hard to win, not for himself, because I think he would welcome the rest, and stepping out of the spot light. But I think that hatred that we see in his eyes toward Romney is not personal. It’s recognition of what this alleged human Romney and his ilk and backers want to do to this country he and we love. He knows what is at stake.
Me too.
Alex S.
Governing is more complex than opposition.
Also, the borders between blogging, journalism and opinionating are melting.
Paul
@Another Halocene Human:
Her vote on the Iraq war would have been enough for me. But her campaign tactics took it to a whole different level where instead of just voting for Obama I started to volunteer for him.
On the other hand, I appreciate what Bill Clinton is doing for Obama now. And I have to admit that Hillary has been a good and loyal Secretary of State. I would be fine with her in 2016.
On a different issue; I will not forget diaries on the recommended list on dailykos telling people not to vote in 2010 elections as a protest against Obama. And now these same people are whining about what the Republican governors/legislators and the GOP house has done.
Matt McIrvin
@Gregory: That’s what strikes me. Political blogging was in its infancy during the dotcom boom/late Clinton era; the only site most people had heard of was Drudge.
Then starting in September 2001 there was this huge wave of right-wing and “liberal hawk” warblogs that were basically pro-Bush. Some were preexisting blogs on other subjects where the proprietor had basically been driven mad by 9/11. (I remember when Charles Johnson mostly posted about web coding, and I’d heard of him mostly for having written some 1990s Atari ST utility software under the trade name “Little Green Footballs”.) I can hardly throw stones given the repellent crap I was posting in various comment sections. But the way I remember it, around 2002-03, the political blogosphere was known as a mostly right-wing phenomenon.
The lefty blogosphere as we know it sprung up basically as the response to that. But it also bled into it at the right edge. Some of the left blogs started out as mostly pro-war-in-Afghanistan blogs. A little bit of the lefty growth happened as former warbloggers wised up and went apostate, over Iraq or Terry Schiavo or whatever; others just got more and more insane.
I’m not sure it was ever that unified. There was conflict from the beginning, as lefties who had been right all along got upset at the attention the Iraq apostates got just from belatedly changing their minds after having stupidly signed onto this gigantic human tragedy. Lots of people in the left blogosphere were not at all happy with John Kerry. There were always people who rejected the Democrats for being on board with the wars, and there were folks like Kos who basically wanted the Democrats to grow a spine and win elections. If anything, I think Obama actually helped, because for once there was a successful national Democrat who had been against the Iraq invasion from the beginning. Apostates and right-all-along people could unify in supporting him.
Political blogs changed because we couldn’t just be reacting to George W. Bush and the post-9/11 freakout forever and ever.
JWR
I don’t know if anybody’s around to read this, but with the talk about FDL, I went over there and read a post called Is Voting for Obama Immoral?, along with its comments.
All I can say is, it’s just like 2000 all over again, where there’s no difference between George Bush (Mitt Romney) and Al Gore (Barack Obama), so the only vote possible is a vote for Ralph Nader (some unnamed third-party.) Every four years, it’s the same as it always was. No concern for the Supreme Court, nothing about womens issues. It’s depressing.
4jkb4ia
I agree with every word in this post BUT
EW, by herself, is able to sell ads. FDL is able to sell ads. If Susie Madrak does not sell ads, that is only a testament to her skills at building a business. Susie Madrak is respected across the progressive blogosphere and is able to coblog at Crooks and Liars, which is much more of a community. (As opposed to Jerome Armstrong who lost all credibility in 2008 IMHO.)
John, you are not trying to do anything other than build a community and have a successful blog, and raise money for Obama and maybe Warren and the Wisconsin recalls on the side. This blog is not here because of activism. (There was something or other in the second post ever here about how you wanted to help the people who were pointing out failures in our media. Everything has changed, even the name, but that hasn’t.) And that’s fine, because a person can get very tired of it being Armageddon every day. The article was about whether the progressive blogosphere is an interest group within the Democratic Party anymore–if they can mobilize for their own causes there. Enough of the progressive bloggers are working for bigger media outlets that it is difficult to have a cause that only progressive blogs are promoting, and not someone like Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent, or Adam Serwer/Kevin Drum(Mother Jones counts–it was part of the liberal media ecosystem when the netroots started) unless it is something like the public option where you need to recruit grass roots and not only netroots.
Maybe it will be another year before I have to go off on another meta rant, even if Obama is reelected.
4jkb4ia
Another significant way to build a community is to have NFL open threads. I’m serious.
Spatula
@Raven:
Can’t imagine why…
Mrs. Polly
@joel hanes: Sorry, Joel, Madrak’s usual work isn’t “reporterly,” unless you consider constantly quoting other people’s articles in near effing entirety for the main body of your post “work.”
I’ve had tangles with her on her blog, but the details are lost to my bad memory and her thin-skinnedness: she wiped them, of course.
hep kitty
Is it really necessary to tear down the pioneers? Why not give them the credit they deserve and just accept that things have changed.
Nothing stays the same, but let’s not pick apart those who had the guts to get out there and say what most people who opposed the run-up to the Iraq war were too afraid to say.
I am so sorry they are soooo whiny. But, leave them alone. They deserve respect for what they have done (including internet fundraising for progressive candidates, to name a few) not derision.
You act like anybody is paying attention to them now. What you are saying is, that is not the case. So why a long post about how much they irritate you? They can’t hurt Obama. As right as they were about Iraq, they have been marginalized. Why doesn’t that satisfy you?
(Oh god, John, I didn’t even realize you wrote this at first. You really need to let that go b/c you have no idea, absolutely NO idea what you are talking about here. Forgodsake don’t insult these people, it’s unbecoming and ungracious)
uptown
Shorter John Cole: I built it!
hep kitty
B/C yeh, where were you in 2003? But now you’re a big star. You should be grateful for the progressive blogosphere, however imperfect, however much they don’t say what you want them to say. And however much you despise them.
Because, where were you in 2003? And despite those awful decisions, look where you are now. So you’re better than them
We get it. Believe me, we get it
hep kitty
@uptown: Here I did 2 long posts and you summed it all up in 3 words.
hep kitty
I’m not forgetting, either. I may disagree with them now, but at the time, they were all I had and the only means by which to communicate with others who opposed the invasion and occupation.
It was like water in a desert. For that, I will always be thankful.
(I have to wonder about what all the high-fivers here were up to at that time, also)
Spatula
@hep kitty:
It’s best not to entertain uncomfortable thoughts, BJ comrade. Move along, nothing to see…
DS
Didn’t Susie Madrak used to be a print reporter? What the fuck does she mean she didn’t have an outlet? I think I stopped visiting Crooks and Liars right around the time she started posting there. This is not a coincidence.
celticdragonchick
The Obama Justice Department defense of DOMA is a historical fact and the documents were filed and are retrievable.
I am a bit perplexed that you actually try to deny that a demonstrably provable event did, in fact, occur.
Link here, along with PDF of brief:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/06/obama-justice-department-defends-defense-of-marriage-act-that-candidate-obama-opposed/
It happened…and it was news when the administration stopped defending DOMA. The various comparisons with incest etc where also made in the initial Justice Dept brief and are also documented. What is it that you are failing to read here? Is this some variation of Green lantern threory where by force of will you can make something dissapear?
Dr. Loveless
I discovered this place around the same time I was losing interest in what, at the time, were my three favorite blogs — Shakesville, Digby, and FDL. Shakesville was transforming into the weird cult that it is today, Digby was becoming weighed down by defeatism, and FDL … well.
I haven’t looked back.
Snowwy
No love for Fafblog? Disappointed in ya’ll.
4jkb4ia
This was enough of an important point that I broke my rule of “You’re not coming here, it’s Friday” to write it in a thread that no one is reading anymore.
If there is anyone who Obama simply rubbed the wrong way on Day One of the 2008 primary, it’s Lambert and Matt Stoller. Naked Capitalism gave both these people a voice and has a thriving community AFAIK because no one does what Yves does. You can’t have nothing but looking for reasons to hate Obama. But you can have a coherent worldview that disagrees with Obama built up over years, and people will keep coming. I don’t keep tabs on Matt that much, but he had a job with Alan Grayson, and a job at the Roosevelt Institute, and he has done a lot of thinking and reading since the person I used to know in 2006.
a) Because he has a Harvard degree, he can contend for the jobs he has had and land on his feet. After I wrote the post yesterday I read the NYT story on waitress moms. Susie Madrak has no college education and had the respect she has had because she can write. In the netroots that’s a minority. If you are talking about the Obama coalition, it’s minorities and very highly educated left-of-center people, and the netroots as traditionally constituted represent one subset of the latter. ABL isn’t the only person in the netroots who has been met with sheer incomprehension by people who think they are progressive. If Obama wins because of the Latino vote, that will be a signal to pay more attention to minorities than to traditional activists. (Latinos aren’t Ohio. But they’re Nevada, and they’re Colorado. I am sure that whoever is reading this saw Nate’s post that whoever loses Ohio needs both Colorado and Virginia.)
b) Back in 2002, it used to be simple. The goal was to support the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party and to take over the party, even if it took as long as a generation. Now many of those villains have been purged or have decided not to run again, and governing has disillusioned people. (Jon Tester went from a hero to a villain in the eyes of Markos, for example.) Definitely if you are Matt Stoller, you realize that electoral politics may not be meaningless but it is just one thing and may not be the main thing that is going on on the left. Some of the old actors want different things now, separate from being an interest group.
Thank you, John. The guy who wrote this post is the one I used to know before all the bullshit started.
Paul in KY
@Warren Terra: Raally agree on Steve. Fuck the fucking Yankees, RIP Steve.
Paul in KY
@Spaghetti Lee: IMO, there’s still enough goons over there.
Paul in KY
@Evolving Deep Southerner: How many of Mr. Johnson’s comments are trolls from the right wing slagging him & other commenters?
Paul in KY
@danielx: I like Digby, but I generally get really depressed/mad when I read her blog.
Paul in KY
@Just Some Fuckhead: I lost access to his at work for quite a while. Think I can get to it now, but I don’t really like the formatting of it, etc.
Love his writing, though. A very elegant eviscerator of stupidity.
Paul in KY
@Evolving Deep Southerner: I think John & Mr. Johnson are/were outliers in that cesspool of butthurt.
Paul in KY
@John Cole: I don’t even know why you would respond to that goober.
I guess just to get it on record…