BuzzMachine

Re right-wing Sullivan
: I have mail on my complaints regarding Andrew Sullivan‘s game of ideological paintball; his latest target being media blogger Jim Romenesko (see yesterday’s post, below).

Ken Layne sees Sullivan’s point and as evidence says, among other things, “I mean, just look at the deeply insulting way Romenesko has dealt with Matt Drudge.”

Ah, but that goes to the point I’ve been trying to make (badly, apparently): Though I happen to enjoy Drudge, I could see many reasons why someone doesn’t like him. Could be because he’s conservative… or because he’s new media… or because he offends certain journalistic standards with his tabloid (and sometimes sloppy) ways.. or because he is — even he’d admit it — obnoxious. If Romenesko criticizes or ignores or even insults Drudge, it’s not necessarily because he’s “left-leaning,” as Sullivan assumes. Motive matters and to assume the motive and base an attack on that assumption is worse than lazy, it is manipulative and essentially oppressive: If I criticize George Bush and you call me a leftie (or unpatriotic), then you are trying to shut me up, not deal with my criticism. You’re trying to make me the issue rather than deal with the issue. You’re making it personal.

That is the problem I have with Sullivan.

I also got mail today from Matthew Yglesias, saying he is “glad to see someone criticize Andrew Sullivan’s increasingly hysterical tone; I’ve been a longtime reader of his and have been disappointed to see his site garnering more and more praise as it gets worse.”

Right. I, too, have come to respect Sullivan even though I come from a different side of the prism; I sometimes disagree with him and often agree with him and that doesn’t make me a leftie or a rightie; Sullivan should hope that just makes me smart or right. Sullivan is too smart to be off leading the torch-bearing villagers on his ideological bitch-hunt. That is the issue: He’s not dealing with issues then. Sure, it’s entertaining and an easy way to whore for clicks but it’s insulting to the audience and, ultimately, himself.

Hitch speaks the truth
: Bush has been in office a year now and Christopher Hitchens brilliantly expresses the surprise that awaits us on his anniversary:

Mr Bush is still one of the most unqualified people ever to have run for the highest office, let alone to have attained it. There will never come a time when he reads for pleasure or takes a serious interest in another country. But the oldest political joke in America has a double-edged point to it. In this society, anybody can be President. And this particular anybody has happened to match an hour in which it is precisely the ordinary people of the country who have behaved with distinction.

Britain: Breeding ground for the ‘binmen’
: The Observer says Britain is thick with terrorists, many now under arrest.

The lesson now appears clear. There are al-Qaeda links from Brighton to Bolton, from Scotland to Slough. The idea that Islamic extremism was limited to a few loud-mouthed polemicists in north and west London has been shown to be nothing more than a comforting fallacy.

‘For years the intelligence community has tried to play down the levels of activity and the threat from Islamic extremism in Britain,’ one London-based security expert said yesterday. ‘But they can’t do that any longer.’

In Washington, Paris and capitals across the Middle East and Asia, officials charged with winding up al-Qaeda are pointing to the UK. They say that Britain is more than just a haven for Islamic dissidents and a centre for the dissemination of extremist propaganda. The French and the Americans maintain that the UK has played a key role as a logistics base for al-Qaeda itself and was critical to the 11 September attacks.

People in glass prisons…
: Without irony, the Observer notes the same day that (1) Tony Blair warns us to treat our prisoners better while (2) Britons complain about the treatment of all the terrorists Britain played host to.

Who pays whom?
: Cheeky Afghans start presenting us with bills for their reconstruction. We were planning to help but let’s remember that this nation harbored and nurtured the terrorists who attacked us. Let’s try billing them before they think of billing us.

The labelmaker
: Andrew Sullivan devalues his considerable intelligence when he engages in the inane name-calling:

It will be fascinating to see whether any of the usual left-liberal journalist watch-dog magazines or bodies say anything about Krugman. The flagship left-liberal media-zine, Jim Romeneskoís MediaNews, routinely recycles smears against conservative journalists, but hasnít mentioned this one. Figures.

That’s a ridiculous smear on Romenesko, who does a very good job of providing links to media stories quickly and reliably with very little opinion.This statement reveals far more about Sullivan than Romenesko. It is shallow, one-dimensional, and stupid; it is a sympton of the conservative paranoia I’ve been talking about, the tendancy to see commies (oops, that’s out of date: I mean lefties) under every rock ready to cause landslides that never happen. This insults the intelligence of the speaker and his audience.

: Sullivan strikes again. Dog: Meet your bone.

The Bin Laden Label
: An idiot Saudi sibling of bin Laden was planning to start a binladen line of clothing and accessories, though the Swiss are now trying to revoke his trademark on moral grounds. And now the Times of London reports that in Afghanistan bin Ladenmerchandise — bin Laden turbans and gym bags and snacks — are all the rage. Says a shopkeeper: “ìMany people here worship Osama… You must understand, the way he has stood up to the Americans, the way he has made them suffer and the way he has managed to escape them, despite all their guns and men, only increases the worship.î

We did it our way
: A fascinating column by Matthew Parris in the Times of London. He loves America, he supports America, yet he says he make a bad partner because we do things our way. Right.

America has simple gods and likes to keep her satan simple, too. Every populace has a tendency to see for a while evidence of a single demonís fiendish plans beneath every stone, but Americans take this to extremes. In Salem it was once witches. In Senator Joe McCarthyís heyday it was Commies. Now it is al-Qaeda. And September 11 offered tremendous provocation.

He tries to argue that we’ve made al-Qaeda bigger, fiercer, and smarter than it really is so we can have our way (the latest quibble: how things are run at what someone — wish I knew who — named Club Fed in Cuba). So read his column from the British perspective but then turn around and read it from the American side of the prism. Yes, we’re going to set the rules. We were attacked. We had to go to war. We remain a target. We are the biggest and most powerful and with that comes the responsibility and the risk and the authority. We’re doing a good job of creating and joining in coalitions — for American — but in the end, his is where the buck has stopped. So, yes, we’ll do it our way.

Maxwell Stupid
: Investigators find email Richard “Maxwell Stupid” Reid sent before trying to blow up a plane. After not getting on his first flight, he asked someone for instruction on whether he should go again and he was told, yes. Can’t wait to track down the handler.

Melt-down
: The PC statue is no more.

But seriously…
: Read Ken Layne‘s controlled rant about the story behind the story in OJR (see yesterday, below). It’s getting personal.

Roses are red, quagmirists are blue…
: I got email tonight from a new weblogger, Will Warren, promising something completely different: a blog in verse. I have to admit, I rolled my eyes. I clicked with fear and trepidation. He sent it to me with fear and trepidation because I had whined about a bad PBS special of post-9/11 poetry. But click I did and the first verse I read — a tribute to a loser leftist column by Heather Mallick in the Globe & Mail — won me over:

Heather Mallick, Heather Mallick,

Do you have a hole cephalic?

Is your cranium still clicking?

Have your brain cells ceased their ticking?

Are your neurons all a-twisty?

Is your vision foggy, misty?

Is your mind becoming cloudy

From your efforts to be Dowd-y?

He takes on Ted Rall’s most ridiculous of statements: ìConspiracy theories are funny things: the wackier they

sound, the more likely they are to be true.”

…And yet I canít get round a stumbling block:

One wacky theory isnít worth two cents:

If it were proven true, oh! what a shock:

That Rall could write a sentence that made sense.

Most of it is satire; one, about Flight 93, is serious. Take a click.

And this inspires me to wish for more blog genres: The country blog or better yet, the hip-hop blog, RapBlog: “Justin Raimondo, you my bitch”

Terrorist hygiene
: Good thing terrorists have bad personal hygiene. They had to be taught where to put deodorant and thank God that Richard “Maxwell Stupid” Reid didn’t put any Dr. Scholl’s powder on his sweaty feet: The London Times reports that his own perspiration doused his fuse.

Bloglash
: It’s typical blog behavior to point out that Matt Welch found this first: The blog backlash continues, this time from ex-Suckster Tim Cavanaugh in OJR. And you have to give it to him that he does capture the blogsters’ endearing habit of praising each other like ladies at a tea lunch (and then snipping behind each others’ backs) as well as our utter dependence on real reporters in real media getting real facts for us to blog and blather about and, finally, our uncanny ability to spread like kudzu.

The weblog is not the most useless weapon in the War On Terrorism. That title is still held by the nuclear submarine. But it is precisely their unconventional methods that make the war bloggers enemies to be feared. Like Al-Qaeda, the war bloggers are a loosely structured network, a shadowy underground whose flexibility and compulsive log-rolling make them as cost-effective as they are deadly. Kill Glenn Reynolds and a thousand James Tarantos will rise in his place. Try to apply the Powell Doctrine and the war bloggers will elude our grasp. Ignore them and they’ll use our own weapons against us.

Of course, ego gratification being the primary goal of any blogger, I’m pleased as punch that Cavanaugh includes me in his broadside. Just so long as they spell the url right.

Happiness is a warm gun
: The FBI released tapes of five would-be suicide terrorists today. Crackpot creeps. One of them is highly dramatic, sinking his head in his arms, then fondling, hugging, and kissing his big gun; this is what he thinks a Jihad fighter looks like. Then, when he believes his 45 seconds of fame are over, he breaks character and grins like a ninny: a bad actor in a home video. Death is a game to them. Sick fun, sick f’s.

Terrorism: domestic and imported
: The timing of the arrest of four former SLA members is likely coincidental (I rarely see conspiracies; I believe the world is rarely well-organized enough to conspire) but it is illuminating, nonetheless, given our current war on foreign terrorism. This takes me back to the ’60s and ’70s to recall our own domestic terrorism: the SLA, various ’60s radical groups, the Black Panthers, the FALN. There are differences: The issues allegedly being fought over were American issues; most of us were not targets and thus did not live in fear; the scale and scope was much smaller; the criminals were not so alien. The biggest difference is that that terrorism of old was aimed at dividing us; these acts of terrorism today have united us. Yet the essence of all this terrorism is the same: This is violent fundamentalism, committed by people who believe they are so right that they will commit any wrong, people who will utterly abandon civilization as they purportedly fight to save civilization from itself. None of these people are freedom fighters. They are criminals.

Blogs on blogs
: Ken Layne brushes away that guy from antiwar.com like so much dandruff.

: And Matt Welch warns that he won’t tolerate reading the suffix “gate” on the prefix “Enron.” Spot on. The mere thought of it — another scandal with the whole, predictable script that comes along just as surely as “City Digs Out” comes along on the front page of any newspaper after a blizzard — gave me a terrible case of media ennui. Enron is a scandal to be sure, a scandal of giga proportion and mega shame. But it’s a financial scandal — think junk bonds, not Monica; S&Ls, not Watergate — not a political scandal.

(By the way, let me be the last to welcome Welch back … at frigging last. Nick Denton, whom I had dubbed the Laziest Blogger, at least managed to find cyberbeachbars in Thailand to post the occasional post; Welch couldn’t find a single cafe to post to us from France? We all felt so neglected.)

: Quick gets very sensitive. Skin thin?

Left … Right … Wrong
: A month after the world changed, Ken Layne wrote, “Something weird is happening in this country, and it’s not just Anthrax and suicide hijackers. The rational people on the Right and Left are finding — surprise! — that we have very much in common. We like it here, and we like the world.”

Ah, the good old days.

We knew they wouldn’t last. And they didn’t. Today, three short months later, we’re back to right-v.-left bickering and backstabbing and bitching. We’re back to politics for politics’ sake. We’re back to the bullshit.

Look around you here in Blogdom and you see it everywhere: people snipping and sniping at each other because of the their political clique — Andrew Sullivan on one end, AntiWar.com on the other, and lots of people lobbing spitballs inbetween. There’s a lot of nya-nya in the air.

I confess that I partook in — and, yes, enjoyed — my own binge of reactionary conservative-baiting in the last few days when I had started suffering repetitive stress syndrome reading the monotonous whining about alleged liberal media bias. I snapped back. And it was fun because it got reaction and it got links but it was stupid. Such bitter banter is all meaningless, unproductive, inane. Stupid.

Politicians do it. Media people do it. And now we’re doing it.

But the people don’t. The people don’t give a rat’s rump about political sniping, politics for politics’ sake, the game for the game’s sake. Go sit in a Denny’s for an hour and you won’t hear that. You’ll hear their real concerns.

They’re concerned about safety and security, especially now; about keeping their jobs; about their health care; about their kids’ education; about their retirement. They’re concerned about real things. Politics is not real.

Now I’m not naive; I know that politics is necessary; it’s how a society balances needs and resources. Playing politics to do what you think is right, to get what you think the people need, is a means to an end.

But playing politics just because it’s fun to nya-nya, well, that’s at best dumb and at worst destructive. Let us hope that blogdom lives above that.

Stupid is…
: Now take this incredibly numb-nuts piece in the Guardian. You could say it’s a sign of liberal media bias. I say it’s just stupid. Simon Tisdall argues that the war against terrorism has led to a “strategic power grab” that is the modern equivalent of “imperialism” and “colonialism” because we’re now dealing with Russia and China and all the Xstans. You could look at it that way. Or you could see this as newfound harmony and common purpose. What’s so wrong with getting along?

Fear of flying
: Howard Stern said this a.m. that he refuses to fly commercial; he’s scared since Sept. 11. Me, too.