They Get Paid For This: Part V - Attack of the Giggly Fratboys

I've made a concerted effort, lately, to read more lefty blogs.

I've discovered something interesting; while I've publicly wondered about the dearth of good lefty blogs in Minnesota, the local left has an embarassment of riches compared to the national scene.

Thanks to the miracle of Sharpreader, I can now browse the content of dozens of blogs without having to bother with actually finding them.

With the biggest of the lefty blogs, that's a distinctly mixed blessing.

I've spent a few days reading the work of a couple of the bigger lefty blogs, Atrios and Oliver Willis. The reading has spawned a new series of posts, "They Get Paid For This", so named because "Atrios" and Willis work for Media Matters For America, a Soros-funded lefty spin site that has apparently discovered how to spend other peoples' money to create "Democratic Underground"-quality broadsheeting.

After browsing Atrios for a couple of weeks, here's a fairly typical post, about one of Kerry's flipflops on one of Bush's war resolution. Atrios notes about Bush's resolution:

At the time he signed the resolution, he claimed it was a vote for peace.

Our goal is not merely to limit Iraq's violations of Security Council resolutions, or to slow down its weapons program. Our goal is to fully and finally remove a real threat to world peace and to America. Hopefully this can be done peacefully.

And, even today, as the ad is running he says:

Of course, I was hoping it could be done diplomatically. But diplomacy failed. And so the last resort of a president is to use force. And we did.

He claimed then it was a vote for peace. He told Congress it was a vote for peace. He then says that the vote for peace that he asked John Kerry to make was actually a vote for war. The previous March he'd said, "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out." So, he told people it was a vote for peace even though he'd decided it was a vote for war. Maybe war is peace. Who the hell knows anymore.

< Sarcasm On > - So apparently Kerry is an idiot? < Sarcasm Off >

That's right, Duncan Black; sometimes to get back to peace, you need to win a war. Most moderately-intelligent people - and that includes a few Massachusetts liberals and even a couple of lefty bloggers - know that when the war comes to you, you either have to win it, or lose it.

"Atrios" basically launched the "Big quote / snarky one-liner" ("Oh, yeah. Bush is honest!") school of blogging favored by so many leftybloggers. One of his big disciples is fellow Soros employee Willis.

Maybe Willis should stick to the snarking. When he tries to string together actual narrative, he gets into trouble:

As Bush makes stuff up along with his puppet government representative, a bomb explodes in Iraq. And they say they can hold elections today. This has gone from a sick joke to just a total denial of reality. Bush right now looks like OJ saying he's looking for the real killer.

Got that? Leave aside the unsupported assertions that spring straight from groupthink and institutional spin (this whole freedom for Iraq thing is Made Up, now, according to the left; and since a car bomb has gone off in Baghdad, the whole "liberation" thing is obviously a scam); Oliver Willis - webmaster and giggly fratboy - is calling Allawi, a man who wakes up every day knowing that hundreds of thugs would gladly trade their lives to lob a grenade at him, a man who has the job of reversing 30 years of Stalinism (and reversing it instantly, apparently) a "puppet".

Suddenly, the local leftybloggers - even the wackjobs - are looking pretty good in comparison.

Posted by Mitch at September 24, 2004 04:41 AM | TrackBack