Arianna Huffington just put words to something many of us (including Arianna) have known for a long time:
McCain is running a textbook Rovian race: fear-based, smear-based, anything goes. But it isn't working. The glitch in the well-oiled machine? The Internet.
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Thanks to YouTube -- and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails -- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price, or to run under-the-radar smear campaigns without being exposed.
More highlights from Arianna's post:
It's as if Rove and his political arsonists keep lighting fires, only to see them doused by the powerful information spray the Internet has made possible.
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Back in the Dark Ages of 2004, when YouTube (and HuffPost, for that matter) didn't exist, a campaign could tell a brazen lie, and the media might call them on it. But if they kept repeating the lie again and again and again, the media would eventually let it go (see the Swiftboating of John Kerry). Traditional media like moving on to the next shiny thing. But bloggers love revisiting a story.
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Rovian politics may or may not end up destroying the GOP. But, thanks to the Internet, with a bit of luck it will no longer have the power to befoul our democracy.
Many who believe that we live in a well-functioning democracy see the Internet as something that "protects" that democracy.
Many of us who believe that we live in a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy see the Internet as one of only two things (the other being the international community) preventing the US from sliding into above-board secular or religious fascism.
Either way you look at it, I'm glad that Arianna put the idea front and center today.
Either way you look at it, this implies that the next major attack from the other side of the culture war will be against the ubiquity, accessibility and neutrality of the Internet. (The attack on the international community is ongoing, of course.) We can hope that, with President Obama and a more progressive Congress, we'll be able to defend effectively against that new surge for a while.
The war's not over till it's over, though.