Glenn Greenwald nails it in
Salon today -- too busy at work to write more, but I was struck by his eloquence in my lunch break reading. I love his analysis of the Beltway mind-set that everyone is motivated solely and primarily by political gain.
The Beltway pundit class and the premises that generate conventional Washington wisdom are corrupt to their core and almost always wrong. And Sunday's Feingold announcement illustrates a major reason why that is so. They operate from a set of completely unexamined, empty premises that reflect their own character and belief system, but nobody else's. Lacking passion and conviction, they think that those deficits are the marks of sober, responsible people. And they project those character flaws onto everyone else and assume that only unserious lunatics are motivated by sincere belief.
All of that combines to produce a worldview that is as inaccurate as it is bereft of integrity and principle. The excitement over new politicians like Jim Webb and Jon Tester -- and the passion inspired by Feingold and even Dean -- has nothing to do with long-standing and increasingly obsolete liberal vs. conservative stereotypes (the only prism through which members of the media can analyze the election results, which is why they are so confused). Instead, the excitement is due to a widespread hunger for people who are outside of and immune to the entire, soulless Beltway machinery -- a system that, in every aspect, is broken and empty.