An article on Netroots Nation has already been posted on the Austin American Statesman's website. It's as bad as you'd expect.
Gore's surprise visit highlights Netroots conference.
It's full of preconceived notions and bad writing. The residents of Austin should demand better from their newspaper.
By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Name-dropping Al Gore and his call for a switch to clean, renewable energy within 10 years was enough to pull whoops of approval from the 2,000 or 3,000 marauding liberals gathered for Netroots Nation at the Austin Convention Center on Saturday morning.
ma·raud·ing [muh-raw-ding] –adjective
- engaged in raiding for plunder, esp. roaming about and ravaging an area: marauding bands of outlaws.
Marauding? Really? Sure the republics are scared of losing their seats this year, but I can't see a bunch of bloggers being threatening. Besides, that first sentence is clumsy and awkward.
So when the former vice president and Nobel Prize co-winner made a surprise — and cleverly scripted — appearance during U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's talk, it looked like the conference might turn into a faint-in.
Oh, yay. The "liberals are hysterical" crap.
Talk that Pelosi (who is arguably so left-leaning that her parenthetical should be D-Beijing) would have a Very Special Guest...
WTF? This is supposed to be a news article, not a blog post. Opinion needs to be kept to yourself, Patrick. How nice of you to compare the Speaker of the House with a communist country. You must have received the talking points from the McCain campaign. They've been pushing the "Obama may be a socialist" line recently.
From the beginning, it was clear these people were convinced the electoral map would be repainted with a brush sopping with blue paint come November.
The believers will tell you it's morning, that they smell the napalm. And it smells like, oh, yes, victory.
I don't see any quotes from people at NRN, you know, saying that. And there's more violent imagery used to describe liberals. I'm sensing a pattern here.
It didn't seem to matter that the conservative and much smaller Defending the American Dream Summit — featuring syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr — was going on in Austin at the same time. That was miles from downtown, so there was little chance for a rumble.
Told ya.
There was even one panel Friday ... that was essentially about how the media weren't liberal enough.
As they say, only in Austin.
No, only in America. The people at NRN are from all over the country. The corporate/traditional media are remarkably similar everywhere. We're the only country that gets infotainment and spin pretending to be news. For example, this article.
Then there was John Dean, the former Nixon White House counsel who has made a second career of railing against what he considers right-wing excesses the way recovering alcoholics preach against strong drink.
Yeah, John Dean's problem is that he couldn't handle the power. The Bush administration is a bunch of harmless social power grabbers who believe laws don't apply to them and think congress isn't a co-equal branch of goverment. Riiight.
It's plinking bass in a barrel to paint liberals as overly intellectual types incapable of having fun unless reading Noam Chomsky counts, and it sure does for them.
Wow, I don't know where to start. Does the AAS still have editors? That ridiculous sentence should never have made it into the paper. It's easy to paint liberals as overly intellectual? You mean we're smarter than you and you know it. Not our problem.
Incapable of having fun? Nope. That's a stereotype. The NRN looks like a lot of fun, and the people there sure seem happy. Dealing with the serious problems this country faces isn't a laugh riot, but someone's got to do it.
Reading Noam Chomsky? Another stereotype. How many people did you actually see reading Chomsky at this event? Any? People talk, attend panels, socialize, and eat together. Try it sometime, Mr. Beach. It's good for you.
The no fun thing? Maybe it's because, as Democrats, they're not used to having it.
Taking back both houses of congress in 2006 was a lot of fun. Winning three more seats from the republics this year in special elections was fun too. I don't know what he's talking about.
This is some very bad reporting. By that, I mean it wasn't reporting, it was a desperate attempt to prove he's not a DFH like those yucky bloggers.
It was the one-time Howard Dean campaign aide [Joe Trippi] who saw, perhaps a little too early and a little too enthusiastically, the transformative power of the Web. As he walked from one place to another Friday afternoon, he got stopped every 20 feet or so by people who knew him or at least knew of his ideas. And this is what they had wrought; this is what he had predicted.
"It's amazing," Trippi said. "I knew it was going to happen, but I'm still blown away that it happened."
The article ended on that accurate and uplifting note. Patrick Beach, thanks for getting something right in your assignment.