Looking over the comments to
Armando's GBCW post, I got increasingly frustrated with them. Armando's own post was (wait for it...) terse. As as a result, a lot of commenters assumed that clients are being shown Armando's posts in an effort to muck up his relationship with them. That may be (part of) what's going on. Armando won't tell us directly, nor should he. Nor am I even particularly interested in that aspect of the affair.
What is important, however, is what precisely the "major Right wing site" is writing in its post that outed Armando. In disclosing past clients Armando has had, the Media Blog is not trying to scare away future business from Armando, but, rather, trying to ruin Armando's credibility HERE AT DAILY KOS. Their post is a challenge to the community: can you rally around someone who has represented, in the past, corporations whom you hate and may even be boycotting as you read this? (Hint: the answer is "hell yes! and stop pestering us!")
The post is a challenge to the dkos community, and a rather insulting one at that. It assumes that we at dkos are completely incapable of understanding that people, out of professional obligation, are forced to interact with people we might think are scum, and, in fact, even make their lives better. For example, my "day job" is fixing computers for professors at the university. In this capacity I've repaired the machines of professors who have written pretty reprehensible things or have views with which I disagree with strongly. What the Media Blog post does is something like this: "hey, moonbats, how can you elevate to FP status someone who has rescued from tape backup all of Don Rumsfeld's email?"
Furthermore, the challenge assumes that the dkos community is a bunch of dogmatic far-leftists. If I had to guess, the fact that it is precisely not that is maybe one of the site's accomplishments we are all most proud of. I know that Armando is more of a "centrist" than I am. I'm over it. This taunt on the Media Blog is, however, "hey, moonbats, this FPer you all love voted for Bill Weld against Silber! DID YOUR MIND JUST BLOW UP?" As you can see, this challenge completely ignores Markos's own road to Damascus moment as a defining element of the site.
Finally, the challenge assumes that we at dailykos aren't capable of assuming that people have lives outside of posting. The language of the post suggests that Armando is a plant himself, posting pro-corporate posts while representing corporate interests. I would imagine something like his support of the Kelo decision would fit in here, even though his defense can be read (and was, by me) as a resounding dismissal of right-wing efforts to hamper the power of the government in future emminent domain cases. I frankly don't give a shit about who Armando's clients are--if his articles are persuasive (and they are), then it's because of his handling of the facts and his rhetoric, not because he has some corporatist taskmaster forcing him to make neoliberalism look desirable. Armando's more centrist than I am, I repeat. I also repeat: I'm over it. The Media Blog challenge can be summed up like this: "hey, moonbats, DID YOU KNOW that this FPer of yours who writes about the law IS ALSO A LAWYER (WITH CLIENTS!?!) IN HIS FREE TIME?"
What the Media Blog post is is a witchhunt. It is an effort to use outing to (probably) make posters' lives more difficult in their professional capacity, but it is also an effort to ruin the credibility of the posters HERE. This leads me to Paul de Man. de Man, like Hergé and other Belgians, was caught in a terrible, terrible position during World War II. But what he did in World War II didn't matter to a single soul (except de Man himself) until, after his death, it was revealed that he had written for a collaborationist newspaper. The revelations were not the result of digging around, looking for dirt, but once de Man was tagged an anti-Semite, opponents of deconstruction were able to increase the brush size and dismiss the school of criticism of which he was a part. In the language of the Media Blog post, they wrote, "hey, moonbat deconstructionists, you all seem like leftists and talk about marginalized minorities, but did you know that this FPer wrote problematic things when he was a youth?"
It was a challenge and a trap. The critics of deconstruction played it like this to set up a queue of willing deconstructionist denouncers. Who would be the first to denounce de Man for being a Nazi? When it came time for his close collaborator Jacques Derrida to respond, Derrida did not denounce de Man, but rather he put the wartime writing in a larger context of de Man's thinking and growth over time.
BUT THAT WON'T DO. Media Blog wants us to DENOUNCE Armando and distance ourselves from him. just as literary critics were afraid, for various reasons, of deconstruction and wanted to use the evidence of de Man's wartime activities as a chance to discredit deconstruction as a whole, the Media Blog wants to use Armando's client list as a chance to discredit Daily Kos as a whole.
It's not going to work, of course, since just as the critics of deconstruction have always failed to understand deconstruction, the Media Blog fails to understand what a dynamic community Daily Kos is.
UPDATE 11:02 CDT: I guess it's time for the obligatory "what I meant to say was..." update. First, I'm sorry that the comparison to de Man has upset so many commenters. I'm so uninterested in rehashing that debate that I sort of wish I hadn't brought it up. But what's done is done, and I won't edit the diary title in revision.
Second: A lot of the commenting has been rather circular, and I'm sorry that a lot of leftover baggage from the GBCW post has poured over. I did not want to engage in a discussion of anonymity, hero-worship, or anything. My point, as I've made in a few comments, is achingly simple:
NRO knows they can't discredit posters at dKos from the right. We would circle our wagons in defense. Instead, they point out that our posters aren't as left as we might think, in order to get posters denounced from the left. We're supposed, in my reading of the NRO post, to denounce Armando since he had, apparently, corporate clients we hate.
So I'm warning against giving in to their taunts and taking their bait. They aren't interested in privacy or anything--they want one of our best critics of the Bush administration silenced for not being left wing enough.