Poison from the right-wing talk shows seeped into the Republican Party's bloodstream and sent that party off the deep end. Limbaugh's show—where Dick Cheney frequently expatiates—has become the voice of the Republican establishment. The same could happen to the Democrats. The spitballs aimed at me don't matter much. The spitballs aimed at Harman, Clinton and Obama are another story. Despite their votes, each of those politicians believes the war must be funded. (Obama even said so in his statement explaining his vote.) Each knows, as Senator Jim Webb has said repeatedly, that we must be more careful getting out of Iraq than we were getting in. But they allowed themselves to be bullied into a more simplistic, more extreme position. Why? Partly because they fear the power of the bloggers to set the debate and raise money against them. They may be right—in the short (primary election) term; Harman faced a challenge from the left in 2006. In the long term, however, kowtowing to extremists is exactly the opposite of what this country is looking for after the lethal radicalism of the Bush Administration.
The history of the conservative movement may complicated, but the way things work now isn't so much. For the most part conservative media veterans take marching orders from the Republican party. What Joe's talking about--regarding the relationship between the netroots and Democrats--is the exact opposite phenomenon: an activists base that is--for now, anyhow--independent enough of its natural party that it's able to exert influence the same way big interest groups and lobbies do. And that's only really a problem insofar as you disagree with those groups on the substance of their issues. Which, in this case, Joe clearly does. But that doesn't mean that comparing the "extremism" of the netroots with the "lethal radicalism" of the Bush Adminitration and the conservative movement--whether on the point of tactics or on the issues themselves--is in any way fair.
Update: David Frum has a predictably different take, and includes a note from Eli Lake, who seemingly doesn't understand how either national polling or Web traffic-counting technology works.
Frum is just playing dumb to make his point that the marxists are in control of the left. Joe McCarthy, here we come. I'd bet Frum has a list of 95, err 76, err 62 card-carrying commies blogging at the top-visited progressive sites.
Surely even the <100 IQs at NRO can't believe that the polls are being manipulated to show 2/3rds of the country is against the Iraq Bushfiasco.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | June 07, 2007 at 04:06 PM