Dean Barnett explaining why the meteoric rise of DKos is
bad for the Democratic Party. You have to read this dreck to believe it.
Hat Tip to my friend Stephen at The Politburo Diktat whose blog was featured this very day on CNNs Blog round-up.
In this article at
The Daily Standard, Barnett says in part:
While Glenn Reynold's Instapundit, the most popular conservative blog, averages in the neighborhood of 150,000 page views a day, the Daily Kos now averages over 550,000; the sites were almost equally trafficked just last fall ... The site has raised bundles of money for Democratic politicians and its patrons ...
Yeap, sounds like a disaster for the Dems alright.
Also, the level of discourse on the Daily Kos and other prominent liberal blogs is not something that would be attractive to the majority of the American public. The writings are often obscene and usually relentlessly hostile and negative. Crude personal attacks, whether aimed at right-wing bloggers or politicians, are the order of the day.
Wow! I have to admit you have us dialed in there Mr. Barnett! We're just a bunch of hate mongering, mean-ass, cyber thugs smearing the noble Republican Aristocracy, unlike the cogent and laudable criticism leveled at the liberal community so often found among the right wing gentry, such as the ever so polite denizens of Creeperville.
And then there is this gem:
Perhaps most pathetically, these politicians' earnest efforts to win Moulitsas's affections often fall flat. On the Daily Kos, the "front page" gets the heaviest traffic; a typical diary languishes in obscurity, one of dozens of similar efforts offered each day by the community unless Moulitsas plucks it from relative anonymity and promotes it to the front page. The vast majority of diaries written by politicians for the site do not get promoted to the front page. Moulitsas didn't even deem Ted Kennedy's screed worthy of special note.
As a non front-page writer who has had quite a few diaries languish in the "obscurity" of ten-thousand hits in one afternoon at Kos, I can understand this concern (/snark). Far better to lap up Instapundit or Powerwhine where I can't even comment than waste my time writing material that only a few thousand people read in an hour (No really, snark off this time). I'm guessing Conyers or Kennedy feel the same way.
Let me straighten this clown out: I'm a centrist to a moderate conservative. I started reading Kos when I became suspicious about Iraq in part because of the articles and links I found here. I grew to understand the deception that I'd fallen for and I started writing about it. I even changed my registration to Independent here in Florida and went door-to-door working for the Kerry Campaign because of it. And I'm only one of thousands.
And boy that Scoop Blog format sure has been a flop for the Democratic Bloggers, huh?
Yeah Dkos is bad for the party alright, but it ain't the Democratic Party it's bad for.
Now let's run Barnett's words through the super-duper right-wing inverse mirror translator ...
"Oh Shit! Holy Fucking Shit! Oh God no! The Daily Kos is growing like a weed and it's now the highest traffic blog on the net! Oh God, they're smoking our ass with free speech and an open forum and networking and their numbers are through the roof while Karl Bush's poll numbers are plummetting! Attack! Attack! They're raising money over us by a two to one margin: Kill, KILL! Goddamit stand up and smear these mother fuckers before more people catch on to the GOP crooks and their cast of 'democratic' enablers like Lieberman! Power to the Powerful, Huyuh!"
