How many Twin Cities leftyblogs jumped up and down and chattered like poo-flinging monkeys at the Franken campaign’s claim that, according to their double-dog secret internal count, were up 22 votes in the recount?

Many.  A veritable   phalanx of the dim,  in-the-bag, deluded, chuzzlewitted and overexposed.
How many said “Hey, wait, this is Franken’s lawyer’s internal count, and we might not want to necessarily use this as grounds to throw another epic Broward-County-like tantrum to try to delegitimize any result that doesn’t go our way, undercutting democracy in the process?”
Few. Very few.

Politicians and media – and by “media”, I mean the “traditional” media, the “objective/detached” media that most of us grew up assuming “the media” were – have a symbiotic relationship, at best.  Politicans need exposure; the media needs material.  The media’s mission is to get Democrats elected putative mission is to be a private check and balance on government – all government.

 But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that “the media” have changed drastically, and rarely moreso than in the past decade.  From the rise of conservative talk radio and the Drudge Report through the explosion of alternative media that they both helped spawn (including this blog and the related talk show), the media’s world has changed as completely as that of any buggy-whip manufacturer circa 1900. 

Of course, any symbiotic relationship has its limits.  A shark will tolerate the remora fish that picks bits of crud out of its gills; it’d probably draw the line at a barracuda try to fill the gig.

With that in mind, I read with interest this piece in the Minnesoros “Independent”; Chris Steller is peeved about being 86ed from one of Senator Coleman’s press conferences:

U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign staff ejected a Minnesota Independent reporter (that would be me) from a press conference at campaign headquarters this afternoon. I made it as far as the inside of a small press conference room at a drab office park in St. Paul where I was just about to settle into the chair that seemed least conveniently located to the exit when a staffer asked who I was with. When I said the Minnesota Independent, he said I’d have to leave. On the one hand, openness to “journalism” on the part of our politicians is a good thing.

On the other hand, when you lie down with the devil, one should not feign the vapors when people wonder “what’s that sulphur smell?”

Steller?  He feighs the vapors:

To my protest that MnIndy is a news outlet like others represented there, the staffer replied, “Right, and it’s funded by George Soros,” and he escorted me out. It’s the fourth time local independent media have been denied access to the senator’s media availability.

Except that the Minnesoros “Independent” is in no way “independent media”.  Leave aside the (accurate, but for our purposes irrelevant) Soros connection; when departing staffers emerge from the Kool-Aid hangover long enough to point out that the “news outlet” that employed them really was a shrill partisan shill – a paid employee of the opposition, in fact – is Coleman and his staff obliged to treat them with the sort of deference and respect that they traditionally pay the Strib, WCCO or MPR?

Bonus question for the Mindy staff (or those that remain):  how do you think I, a talk show host working for a media organization that is as partisan as yours, but at least honest about it, would get treated at a Keith Ellison press conference? 

(Hey, at least right-wing politicians return your calls.  As I showed last year, DFLers apparently consider themselves above that basic courtesy).

Lefties; why should Norm Coleman give access to a media outlet who is not only in the bag for the opposition, but utterly disingenuous about it?

…that the staff of The Onion won’t be missing their target of the past eight years, George W. Bush, nosirreebob…:

Oh, God, no,” says feature editor Joe Garden. “It’s been a nightmare trying to figure out what to do with him [in the paper].” From the Onion’s standpoint, Barack Obama’s nomination and his rock-star celebrity were good news, “simply because he has people interested in politics, which lets us satirize something people care about,” says Garden.

…I have been meaning to ask for quite a while – isn’t it time to start satirizing The Onion? 

Is it just me, or have they been phoning it in for the past year or two?

The first post this blog did that generated any attention – and by that, I mean maybe 50-60 hits, in those days before this blog had any kind of regional following at all, back in the summer of 2002 or so – was the “DFL Dictionary”.  The post – which is, unfortunately, lost to history (for now) listed a series of common words that the DFL had re-defined for their purposes.  For example:

“Bipartisanship (noun): to belong to a non-DFL party, but to espouse and support DFL policies without any serious question”.

That kind of thing.

And it’s become almost a cliche among leftybloggers in recent months lately as long as I’ve been reading them;  a sort of inexorable “inflation” in pejoratives.  Conservatives never take umbrage, they “whine”; we don’t argue, we “melt down. 

Now, I’m a pretty lucky guy.  Generally pretty happy with life.  I have two great kids, a job I love, a couple of hobbies I love even more, great family, great friends – really, just about a guy could want out of life.  I’m in the best shape I’ve been in in decades, I’m feeling generally good about life, I’ve dispensed with a lot of real and metaphorical baggage in the past year or so, and while life has all sorts of inevitable twists and turns, things are generally going pretty dang well right now.  One of my hobbies – debating politics with strangers in writing and on the radio – has turned into a fun sideline; in this, I’ve been able to find some semblance of fulfillment, as well as some future possibilities, while honoring my sense of integrity.  In other words, I’m getting little bits and piece of happiness, and all in all it’s a pretty good stretch for me, knock wood.

Which, if you’re a gutless anonymous leftyblogger, means “angry”, “hateful”, bla bla bla.

No, really.  “Stove” from Cocky Slob just can’t get enough of trying to jam people into his own bigoted little template:

It came to Spot today, unbidden. In over three years of reading blogs and writing this one, Spot has been unable to find the word that summed up the festering Bund of the right wing blogosphere. But he’s got it now: bullies.

Ooh.  Another neo-Nazi reference. 

He must be writing about something serious.

What, after all, is a bully? It’s someone who is cruel and overbearing, a thug. Someone who picks on somebody else, preferably smaller and weaker, maybe to make himself feel like a big cheese, or even just appear to be one to the drooling sycophants he wants to impress. The words of the bully almost always have a tinge of intimidation in them, or sometimes more than just a tinge.

Or sometimes much, much less than a “tinge”. 

Indeed, in some cases it’s more of a “little corner of actual meaning that you’ve carefully sanded to fit your own  myopic, bigoted, deranged template through which you force all of your own perceptions”. 

As in “you read “apples”, and see “axles””.

There they sit on the bar stool of grudge and resentment, taking big swigs from their tankards of bile, belting out tuneless refrains of impotent rage. Then, tottering home in crazed and bilious humors, they sit down and write stuff like this.

He links to the piece I wrote Tuesday about former Minnesoros “Independent” writer Molly Priesmeyer and City Pages doddering troll Emily Kaiser. 

Rage?  Bile?  Crazed? 

It is no especial mystery why all the paranoid, poisoned, gun-toting crazies are all on one side.

(Although why some people need to vilify, defame and demonize those who disagree with them is an “especial” puzzler to those of us with fuller, richer lives) 

 The pathology is unremarkable. But its consequences over the last twenty five years or so have been catastrophic.

If only because they – “consequences” like people speaking freely and still disagreeing with “Spot”, gutless anonyme – seem to have driven their author around the bend into complete derangement.

Intimidation?  I wished Molly Priesmeyer good luck in her job searc, having been in her shoes all too many times (sometimes with kids to feed, to boot).  I’d like to be so “intimidated” by my nemeses.

Bullying?   I’m the underdog, you half-trained trick chimp.  I’m a little solo blogger from Saint Paul.  Emily Kaiser writes for a multi-million dollar corporation; Molly Priesmeyer wrote for a Soros front, and not being an untalented writer will no doubt get picked up by another sooner than later.

It is a period from which the barest signs of emerging have now just appeared. But the bud is nascent and the bullies will try to kill it.

Catch that?  It’s not just responding – “participating in life”.  It’s “bullying” and “crushing your hopes”. 

For some of us, the notion of “disagreement” and “dissent” isn’t a threat. For the others, there are anonymously-posted pictures of the Nuremberg Rallies.

Courage my friends.

“Courage”.  Heh.

This from a guy who blogs anonymously – who quite visibly panics, indeed, at the notion of being “outed”, when he’s not taking his defamatory, cowardly little shots at his betters.

The word we’re looking for is “deranged”.  

Look that one up on “Answers.com”. 

Courage, little doggie.  Now, run and play.  You are boring and predictable.

(Via Fut)

In the wake of the budget trimming at the Minnesoros “Independent”, someone leaked a copy of Robin “Rew” Marty’s memo to the surviving staff to Romanesko.  Who printed it (I add emphasis):

Memo to Center for Independent Media employess

Hi, everyone. I know the last 24 hours have been a lot to think about. We also understand that one of the the assets of online media is that everyone knows lots of reporters, and has established very close relationships with their media, both local and national. I need to ask you all to please not respond to media questions about the CIM and our restructuring process. If you receive any calls or emails, please forward that information on to me so I can direct inquiries to the proper channel. It is imperative that you do not talk to the media yourself about this issue. Any violation of this will be grounds for immediate dismissal.

Thank you for your assistance in this, and one again, thank you all for continuing on with us. If you have any questions, please do hesitate to contact me.

Robin Marty
Deputy Program Director
Center for Independent Media

On the one hand, it’s “good” to see that an organization that would seem to have no capacity for shame actually being embarassed.

Or at least to know they should be.

David Brauer on the melt-down:

In essence, the memo tells the chain’s remaining muckraking journalists not to talk to muckraking journalists calling about recent budget slashing.

…

For the record, I’ve emailed Marty — no response. CIM spokesperson Dan Walter, emailed me Monday that “a letter from the publisher on the site tomorrow explaining the situation” would be posted — it wasn’t. And requests to interview CIM poohbah David Bennahum have been met with Walter’s cordial stonewalling (though a Colorado site gets hilariously contradictory interviews with CIM’s leadership here.)

If Bennahum thought this was going to blow over, Romenesko just blew him up.

 Welcome to the feeding frenzy, by the way, Romanesko and Brauer.  Glad to see what it takes for alt-leftymedia to make it on the alt-leftymedia radar:

Agenda journalists obfuscate and stonewall about their funding?  Not a story.

Buddies of lefty alt-media figures feel they’ve been shafted by fellow lefty alt-media figures?  That’s a story.

But better late than never, anyway.