Jeff Jarvis joins the Chicago 8. I can stop any time I want to. Really. I don't have to keep after each fresh idiocy that emerges when Jeff Jarvis writes about politics and the Democratic party; I just do it for the sport. Really. I'm gonna quit tomorrow—it'll be easy.

This is Round 3 of the most recent skirmish in Jeff's self-appointed, self-infatuated crusade of the center against the marauding hordes of the Deaniac Left, and it's wonderful how much deeper a hole he digs for himself with each post. (But if you think there's a bottom, remember Satan's words in Paradise Lost: "But in the lowest deep a lower deep/Still threatening to devour me opens wide" ...) We pick him up here, hectoring Oliver Willis (who seems for the time to have replaced Eric Alterman in Jarvis's affections) for daring to have written lucidly about why it doesn't pay anymore for Democrats to play the hands-across-the-aisle game with the Rove/DeLay GOP. Reader, be warned: contained in the blockquote below is a nugget of purest inanity, so refined, so alchemically perfect in its quality of self-annihilation, that men have gone mad from staring too long into its depths. Approach with composed mind, if you dare:

If you keep thinking that the other party is the enemy, you lose sight of the real enemy, an enemy I have seen first-hand. We have met the enemy, Oliver, and it's not us.

You see, Oliver, when I grew up in politics, we did fight our own party to make it better. Hell, we rioted in the streets of Chicago against our own party. I didn't do that (couldn't skip high school, you know), but I did demonstrate at a precocious age against the party's president, Lyndon Johnson, and we knocked him out. The Democratic party has a proud history of struggle within to improve itself. If you give that up, then you act not like a politician but a propagandist, selling only the party line that comes from above. What did your precious Howard Dean do in the election but criticize the party and try to make it over and take it over (and, indeed, he took it over)? He can criticize the party and I can't? Where's the logic there, Oliver? Where's the fairness? Where's the democracy in the Democratic Party, then?

(The real enemy, to gloss for those unfamiliar with Jarvis's style of paranoid self-dramatization, are all them Muslims out there trying to steal our Precious Bodily Fluids—whose 9/11 assault not only destroyed lives, but seems to have permanently damaged the part of Jeff Jarvis's brain devoted to political thinking.)

Jarvis seems to cherish the idea that he's the Jon Stewart of this exchange, when God help him he's the Tucker Carlson. (You're hurting the Democratic Party. Just stop. Please.) All I can make out from this is that it's bad, very bad, the worst thing really, for Democrats to attack other Democrats, at least when it's Jeff Jarvis being attacked: unless it's Jeff Jarvis doing the attacking, in which case it's the acme of self-sacrifice and a sacred fulfillment of civic duty. In struggling against Jeff Jarvis and Dems like him, Oliver Willis (following the trail of his spirit-guide Howard Dean) is betraying the "proud history" of Democratic struggle, er, somehow, which history is even now being reprised by Jeff Jarvis, who rioted on the streets of Chicago against a sitting Democratic president, except that he didn't. And is rioting now, in his own mind, on his own blog, against the Democratic candidate who didn't actually run for President. Where's the logic, indeed.

But step back from this for a moment, and contemplate the fact that Jeff Jarvis, an apologist for global colonial warfare, is here claiming the mantle of the anticolonialist, antiwar radicals of 1968. If that don't curdle the Dairy Mate right in your coffee, I don't know what will.

But no, I'm not hooked, really. See? I just quit. I'm quitting right ...now. Right now.

posted by michael  9:28:51 PM  
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South Dakota stealthblogging. I usually don't excerpt/link to stuff when I don't think I can add something of my own to the discussion, but—given the interest I've been taking lately in the right-wing misuses of political blogging—this is just too good to pass by. Over at Personal Democracy Forum, Jan Frel writes an excellent, comprehensive account of how the Thune campaign employed stealthbloggers to game the South Dakota media and gain a crucial advantage over Tom Daschle in a tight race. Here are the opening grafs, which hit every note right:

At the end of January, newly-elected South Dakota Senator John Thune briefed his colleagues at a closed-door GOP retreat in West Virginia about the importance of blogging in contemporary politics. Thune earned his bragging rights by defeating former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle this past November, in a race where conservative bloggers played a small but important role. But the story that Thune has to tell isn't anything like earlier political blog successes such as the Dean for America campaign blog or DailyKos.

The blogging efforts on behalf of Thune's Senate campaign didn't cause greater civic participation or bring in piles of small donations. Instead nine bloggers -- two of whom were paid $35,000 by Thune's campaign -- formed an alliance that constantly attacked the election coverage of South Dakota's principal newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. More specifically, their postings were not primarily aimed at dissuading the general public from trusting the Argus' coverage. Rather, the work of these bloggers was focused on getting into the heads of the three journalists at the Argus who were primarily responsible for covering the Daschle/Thune race: chief political reporter David Kranz, state editor Patrick Lalley, and executive editor Randell Beck.

Led by law student Jason van Beek and University of South Dakota history professor Jon Lauck, the Thune bloggers tormented and rattled the Argus staff for the duration of the 2004 election, clearly influencing the Argus' coverage. They also appear to have been a highly efficient vehicle for injecting classic no-fingerprints-attached opposition research on Daschle -- most of it tidbits that perhaps might never have made it into the old print media -- directly into the political bloodstream of South Dakota. What they did may turn out to be a "dark side of politics" model for campaign-blogger relations in 2005-06 -- made all the more telling by the fact that the Thune bloggers relied heavily on now-discredited Jeff Gannon/James Guckert of Talon News for many of their stories.

The piece is called "Daschle, Thune and the Blog-Storming of South Dakota," and the only criticism I have is that in this case the use of "blogstorm" is a bit misplaced; it's clear (and Frel in fact writes it this way) that the Thune tactic wasn't to use blogs to whip up a media storm, rather it was to turn them into a new, more coordinated instrument in the right's old "work the refs" gambit.

posted by michael  10:06:40 AM  
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