(Note: This was published originally over at my blog, BigLeftOutside, with its own comments section. But, as text below reveals, it's a great moment for Daily Kossians, too... and a very, very, very, very bad moment for the neocon warbloggers out there. ¡Bumaye!)
Well, well, well...
This Vanity Fair story on the rise of lefty blogs by James Wolcott is bigger than I thought, and this BigLeftOutside blog had a much more extensive role in the narrative than anybody dared tell me.
I know, I know, you didn't want the subhead to go to my head.
Here is the headline and subhead:
The Laptop Brigade
Don't dismiss blogs as the online rantings of B-list writers. Interlinked and meritocratic, seething with fierce debate and rivalries, they're the best thing to hit journalism since the rise of the political pamphlet. Talents such as Josh Marshall, Al Giordano, and Kos are holding mainstream-media feet to the fire.
By James Wolcott
...and in the collage of blogs that make the artwork for this
Vanity Fair story, there is even a photograph of BigLeftOutside, of the very screen you are looking at right now.
This is what my colleague Stephen Marshall of Guerrilla News means when he speaks of "creating a revolutionary asthetic."
Now I get it! Now I know why I've been getting those envious, grumbling, looks from some other bloggers of late... Why even some bloggers that got mentioned in the story aren't mentioning it back... Why neocon warbloggers are suddenly insisting that they are neither neocon nor warbloggers... Why Instapundit has gone on a sudden vacation... Why Rush Limbaugh's old drug dealers keep jogging past his mansion in anticipation of the inevitable red light in the window... Why born again xtians are buying ads on the R-rated Wonkette!
Beyond the subtitle, I get quoted (accurately too!), and a lot. I get quoted a lot more than anybody told me... a lot more than the quotes y'all sent me below.
It's one thing to be quoted. But it's another thing to have something to say when it happens. You decide if I met that bar.
First off, did you think you'd ever read in Vanity Fair a quote like this one:
"...as we pull on the Court Appointed President's arms and legs and quarter him in the months to come."
Do I, like, get a visit from the Secret Service for that one?
Here's another excerpt:
Al Giordano sees it as a stealthy insurrection: "The Internet, like Kerry, sneaks up on the frontrunner, Commercial Media, without letting its footsteps be heard, while it gets written off and underestimated by the very forces that seem to be in charge."
Best of all, I wasn't talking to Vanity Fair when I typed that. I was talking to you! (And part of you apparently wrote for Vanity Fair. Wonder who else is out there.)
And our conversation was considered relevant to the trend now under the Klieg lights.
But the best part of all - speaking of drawing and quartering - was Wolcott's smackdown of the neocon warbloggers. I mean, there are some immortal quotations in this essay. Like this one:
"Andrew Sullivan attracts so many personal attacks because he makes it so easy... like a bad tenor begging to be pelted with fresh produce."
Two entries down, I also quoted (via Jeff Jarvis) what turns out to be only part of the slaying of the neocon blog beast by Wolcott:
"Only a few years ago, the energy and passion were largely the property of the right hemisphere, where Sullivan, Glenn 'Instapundit' Reynolds, and N.R.O.'s Victor Davis Hanson fired up the neurons against defeatism, anti-Americanism, and death's-head specter of Islamic terrorism billowing from the ruins of ground zero..."
But what came next was even better. Listen to Wolcott here:
"...I'd frequent these blogs for moral uplift, mentally applauding their jeers at matchstick figures on the left such as Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said (sentiments I'm ashamed of now)..."
Wolcott is showing us, through his own transformation, the parallel transformation of the great American swing voter from post-911 confusion to finding their way home...
"But I parted sympathies with the bugle boys when they repositioned their bomb sites for Iraq. Honest, confused, souls could disagree over the case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. It was the ugly rhetoric, fatheaded hubris, and might-makes-right triumphalism that repulsed. Warbloggers hunkered into B-grade versions of the ideological buccaneers in the neoconservative camp. Punk-ass laptop Richard Perles, they excoriated dissenters as wimps, appeasers, and traitors, peddled every xenophobic stereotype (the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," etc.) and brushed aside the plight of the Palestinians with brusque indifference or outright contempt. And the warbloggers behaved like they owned the legacy and sorrow of September 11th, as if only they understood How Everything Changed and those who disagreed had goldfish bowls on their heads. 'For the Clintonites, 9/11 didn't really happen," Sullivan preposterously claimed as recently as January 2004. When I stray into these sites now, it's like entering the visitor's center of a historical landmark. The rhododendrons need dusting, and the tour guide isn't listening to himself, having done his spiel endless times before.
"Liberal blogs are now where the bonfires blaze."
That's more than an essay. That's a manifesto and breaking news report all rolled into one.
The real news is not that Wolcott gave a helping hand to some of us out here on the big, left, outside, edges of the blogosphere.
It's the permanence with which he slammed the Hammer of Thor down upon the petty, right, inside.
Splat!
Normally, if any magazine so much as whispers the word "blog" all the neocon bloggers start cumming in their pants, huffing and puffing about it, analyzing every line, every word, but Wolcott leaves them sputtering in silence, speechless.
Like George Foreman after the bungle in the jungle, they will now fall into a two-year depression, with the chant of the masses - "Ali Bumaye! Ali Bumaye!" - echoing in their tinfoil eardrums.
Baby, we have only just begun to chant.
Bumaye! Bumaye! Bumaye!