Decision ‘08

Dan Gerstein Tells The Truth…

If the liberal blogs want to understand why so few people outside their narrow echo chamber take them seriously, and what it will take to gain the broader credibility they crave, they should look no further than their handling of the recent flap over John Edwards’ foul-mouthed blogger hires.

This ugly morality tale - which mercifully concluded Tuesday with the second of the two offending online staffers resigning from the Edwards campaign - revealed the Kossacks in all their angry adolescent glory: impudent, impotent, unreflective and unaccountable.

Throughout the course of the controversy, the left’s bigger digital diatribers never stopped to address the substance of what the Edwards bloggers actually wrote before joining the campaign. Had the bloggers done so, they might have found the postings were widely deemed by Democrats and Republicans alike as bigoted and patently offensive to many Christians, not just devout Catholics or evangelicals.

Nor did they ever stop to think how hollow and hypocritical it sounded for the same people who ravaged George Allen, for his “macaca” moment in last year’s Virginia Senate campaign to cry “free speech” when confronted with a far more nasty, vulgar, and hurtful display of prejudice from two of their own.

Instead, right until the bitter end, most liberal bloggers responded in their familiar mode – by lashing out at their critics and trying to marginalize them. This was, in their eyes, purely a manufactured controversy by the “right-wing smear machine” and a cynical attempt to silence and marginalize the Netroots.

Indeed, even after the two Edwards staffers essentially surrendered, the few bloggers who wrote postscripts kept up the front of the petulant, blame-deflecting 15-year-old who got caught spreading rumors about the homecoming queen.

Read the whole thing - it’s quite good, but we know what kind of reaction this will get from the Nutroots®, don’t we? If there were ever even one single instance where Glenn Greenwald, Atrios, Kos, Bowers, et al, made a stand against unfair mass slanders of the type so prevalent in the progressive world, I would probably have to check myself into a hospital for symptoms of cardiac arrest.

If there is a more typically self-righteous person than a self-styled “progressive”, I hope I never meet him…