In the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton had what is now called his "Sister Souljah moment" when (I think it was on MTV) he publicly criticized something or other that she said (does anybody remember what it was?), and it was spun as a metaphor for the then presumptive Democratic nominee's willingness to stand up to uppity blacks.
It was a cynical maneuver by Clinton, worthy of scorn, but it worked to gain him centerfield traction in his campaign against Bush Senior.
Ever since John Kerry became the presumptive Democratic nominee of 2004, political junkies have wondered which constituencies on the left Kerry would similarly whack to follow in Clinton's footsteps. For a while it looked as though it might be gays over the gay marriage issue. Then, last month, it was Hugo Chávez, and we're all over that one like a cheap suit.
But never, ever, did I think it would end up being The Daily Kos. Sad but true, the Kerry campaign caved to neocon bloggers and delinked Kos from its blogroll after the aforementioned right wing cretins launched an all out campaign to indulge their censorious impulses. Let's face it, the moment anybody calls for delinking or for advertisers to pull ads from a media, that person is revealing his true anti-free speech colors.
I personally am glad to see the neocon bloggers out on that limb.
Quick, hand me the chainsaw!
The uproar came over a statement made, then retracted, by Kos, a military vet, that he felt no sympathy for some soldier-of-fortune mercenaries killed in Iraq. My view? Kos didn't need to retract an honest expression of emotion (he may have, in fact, merely pricked a finger-drop of blood with that retraction into the shark infested waters, getting them all riled up). I would have, in a similar situation, stood my ground. Nothing requires us to cry crocodile tears over people who, for money, knowingly risk their lives in foreign military adventures. They bought that ticket of their own free will. There is an important difference between the soldier who serves his country at personal sacrifice and the mercenary who serves under a different flag: that of the dollar bill. And if the Kerry campaign would now like to now de-link from me for saying that,
bring it on! BigLeftOutside could use the free publicity.
But every cloud has its silver lining and some good is coming out of this dust-up already.
First, the melee is forcing lefty bloggers - the new kids on the blogblock - to think more carefully about how we define ourselves in relation to partisan political campaigns. Lefty blogs have never had the jackbooted characteristics of the "Blogs for Bush" circle-jerk. And, by and large, we've been more honest about who we are and where we stand - we tell you, honestly, we want to remove the Court Appointed President (and not having to hide that disclosure, it frees us to be more honest on non-campaign related news stories) - than the neocons who disingenuously claim to be neither neo nor con, and who can't be honest enough with readers to admit: "Yes, I support the Bush campaign and my number one goal is to get him elected in November, and everything you read here is spin toward that goal, or fluff to make me seem techno-cool and not just a wannabe Republican political operative."
The popular liberal activist blogger known as Atrios has responded to the situation by openly requesting that the Kerry blog delink from him, saying, "if we haven't grown up enough to realize that one stupid retracted comment posted by a blogger in the comments section of someone else's diary post on that blog deserves absolutely no official written response by a campaign - no matter how offensive it is - then I don't think we're grown up enough yet to have blog/campaign complementarity."
Related, is that Atrios, Kos, and others are now reassessing their policies regarding paid political ads. This is serving as a very interesting online teach-in about how advertising contaminates speech.
Paid speech is not free speech: it is extrinsic to it. Nothing in the First Amendment ever had paid speech in mind. Still, I don't criticize fellow bloggers for accepting ads: If I had 90,000 readers a day like Kos I would be tempted to go the same route. At the same time, Narco News is in that league but has always refused generous offers of advertising - $2,000 a month per ad! - because I know from my long experience in the Commercial Media the slippery slope for journalism once that banana peel is stepped upon. But, hey, everybody's gotta eat, and I consider the decisions over whether to accept advertising or not to be the autonomous right of each blogger and publication. I do hope, though, that the lesson is not lost here: that paid advertising is fundamentally antithetical to a free press.
Second comes the best result of this constroversy: The gloves are off in the blogosphere! We really must give credit to James Wolcott of Vanity Fair who noticed and was first to report the important differences between the neocon warbloggers who are slipping out of fashion and the up-and-rising left fist online. The blogosphere, when I started here last June, was a smarmy "you link to me and I'll link to you" clubhouse, in which everybody pretended to be friends. Now, I'm already boycotted by Romenesko's Media News: I wear that like a medal on my chest. And Instapundit, once he figured out that we're playing hardball over here with his hero Dubya, hasn't linked to me in ages. I don't need any of 'em. Why suck up to anybody? I call 'em as I see 'em. And like Mario Menéndez, I don't cry over such inconsequentialities: I fight.
If you read between the lines of Instapundit's screeds against Kos this week, you will see envy tapping on that keypad, and also the kind of separation from reality that happens all too often in the lofty heights of academia. "Kos now appears to have taken down his site," gloated Glenn Reynolds, only to have to retract it a while later (what appears to have happened, instead, is that all the extra traffic to Kos' site brought by this controversy motivated him and Rusty of Scoop to move The Daily Kos to a bigger, better, server). Increasingly, and measurably, the voice of Instapundit is that of the once indisputed blog king suffering his squirms of denouement, and nostalgia now that his time is up. He's got nothing fresh or new to say about anything - just "rah! rah! terror war! rah rah!" - and his site that used to be a daily read for me now is only a place, like the old Pravda, to check when I'm looking for the neocon party line on some news story or other. Wolcott fried him in Vanity Fair - I didn't notice Instapundit even mention the Vanity Fair story about blogs: silence doesn't whisper, it screams - and you can see it in Glenn's tone ever since: it is the familiar archetypal voice of the defeated triumphalist.
Personally, I'm glad the gloves are coming off. It's going to make for a better blogosphere. It might even generate some paying gigs for Aaron Kay, the yippie Pie Man, at upcoming Bloggercon conventions. The blogosphere needs more kicking and scratching. Until that happens, nothing will feel as if it matters. And it all does matter.
Kos is one of the few bloggers who I consider a must-read, because he is so obviously a human being in a medium dominated by techno-dweebs who bore me to tears with their attempts to sound scholarly, as if they're auditioning to get the Krugman slot at the Times. And he makes things happen in the real world. He's just done it again. And as the dust settles, we're going to see good things come out of it.
Finally, a note to my fellow and sister bloggers: This ought to be obvious, but apparently it is not. The main reason Kerry has used blogs for his "Sister Souljah moment" was to suck up to the enemy: the Commercial Media. Do not forget how resented we are in those circles of another kind of paid mercenary. (Heh. Screw them, too!) It should be no surprise at all that CJR's "Campaign Desk" - whose only mission in life is to discredit blogs on a macro level in order to prop up the decaying Commercial Media's cred - led the charge against Kos' statement of raw, human, emotion from a real soldier. Bloggers of conscience need to understand that the entire context of what we do is adversarial to the Commercial Media. The Commercial Media enemy sees it that way, and we would all do well to recognize it and plan accordingly.
In that light, I hope that good bloggers out there apply for this year's Narco News School of Authentic Journalism scholarships. I'd very much like to award some scholarships to energetic bloggers and arm them - as we arm print, online, radio, TV, and documentary journalists - for the battles ahead. Applications are available via email at solicitud@narconews.com