As liberals, we take pride in not only being the antithesis to the right wing, but we like to think of ourselves as better than our conservative counterparts. We value truth, compassion, and intellect. We believe in the right to an opinion and the freedom to express it. We revile the typical right win smear machine and their propaganda tactics. All in all we have a fairly noble view of ourselves.
But is it true?
Could it be that we are just the yin to their yang? Is it possible that we are not the better half, but just the other half? Is the blogosphere of the left just the liberal equivalence to the conservative propaganda machine? I believe the answer is no, we are better than that. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to guard against our baser instincts and the temptation to fight fire with fire.
An example of our failings, and the inspiration for this diary, came yesterday over some comments McCain made concerning Social Security. The comments were fairly innocuous, delivered in response to a direct question during one of those town hall meetings McCain loves so much, basically saying that SS needed to be fixed. Not a real newsie tidbit. You may agree with McCain, you may think the SS system is working beautifully, whatever. That's immaterial. But it’s certainly a topic open for discussion, albeit a tricky one, since it’s one of the ubiquitous third rails of politics. Lots of politicians have discussed the relative merits of the SS system, however, and it’s certainly not an out of bounds political topic, right? That was before the liberal blogosphere got a hold of it. I will confine this example to the DKos site in the interest of brevity and clarity.
It starts with a diary. The diary does its level best to conflate McCains comments to read "McCain wants to do away with Social Security" and declaring his campaign officially dead due to this momentous gaffe. By context or direct quote, this is a blatant falsehood. That did not stop of our fellow bloggers from presenting it that way. In an ethically deprived attempt to misconstrue comments to feed some red meat to the liberal wolverines, McCain was misquoted and misinterpreted by members of our own community.
This is the same tactic Rove, O’Reilly, Limbaugh and the rest revel in. Take a quote or phrase, twist the content and context until its unrecognizable and then repeat the lie enough for it to gain traction and eventually be represented as fact by folks who don’t even realize it’s not true. "Everyone else is outraged about it, therefore it must be true and I must be outraged as well." Such is the danger of creating an echo chamber of this sort.
No matter which side of the political spectrum you stand on, this is unfair and unethical, not to mention an affront to the truth. I submit that we are better than that. Wrong is wrong, no matter who the target is.
But the writing of a diary full of false outrage is not the real crime, although that is certainly bad enough. This was picked up by fellow bloggers and repeated, denounced and puffed with enough phony self-righteous indignation it was pushed to the Recommended List. This, of course, was like throwing gasoline on a fire and more comments of anger and outrage which somehow merits a post on the front page of DKos. And all because we WANTED to believe it, regardless of the facts at hand.
To sweeten the hypocrisy herein, many of the comments following the posts claimed that the evil main stream media would never pick this up due to their love affair with McCain. The fact that the MSM did not pick up on this certainly came true, but the Machiavellian plot to disregard a campaign ending gaffe my be overblown. Perhaps the MSM did not pick up the story because there was no real story to report? "McCain makes innocuous comment on SS" is hardly a man-bites-dog media extravaganza. But that doesn’t stop some from creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of MSM conspiracy to abet their suspect claims. These are Limbaugh tactics at their finest, ladies and gentlemen. (You do realize that the conservative, too, claim constant and unending media bias, right?)
To beat it all, I could understand if this was a community of dullards and drama queens. There are certainly enough of those sites around. What attracted me, and I’m sure others to DKos is that by and large this is a haven for intelligent and reasonable discourse and a break from the usual uninformed internet/blogosphere madness. This kind of group-think behavior is certainly out of character here for the most part, and we can be glad of that fact.
That doesn’t mean we should condone it when it happens or make weak excuses for our behavior. I’m sure there will be a few people who will feel the need to defend themselves by giving lengthy and clintoneque parsings of the McCain quote, how it DOES mean what they want it to mean, and how I am a traitor to liberalism in general and the democratic party in specific for having the sheer temerity to defend McCain for NOT screwing up.
Go for it, if it makes you happy. It’ll bolster my point. The main body of the electorate doesn’t care, nor would they buy into partisan word parsing of obviously run-of-the-mill stump rhetoric. The silence on this supposed inflammatory "issue" has been deafening. That should kill the whole "McCain just torpedoed his campaign" nonsense right there. This is not a silver bullet. It’s a non-issue.
And it's beside the point. I'm not challenging a specific diarist in particular, and not inviting argument about this particular issue (although I'm sure this will occur). That's why I have not linked to specific diaries and posts. The challenge is to the community at large to be on guard against getting swept up in this type of behavior. I'm sure I have been guilty of this myself, so I'm not pointing a finger. I'm turning on a light.
It’s not like there are a shortage of things to hammer McCain on. He is on the wrong side of almost EVERY issue. We don’t need to stoop to the knee-jerk reactionary tactics to beat McCain. We certainly don’t need to make things up. There is a wealth of ammunition to use on McCain. Use it. But quit playing right-wing "gotcha" politics with every utterance. It’s unnecessary and it undermines our position on the moral high ground.
So lets tally the score: A front page post, two diaries (that I am aware of), 901 comments of complete ridicule and outrage with very few posts counseling sanity, and a tip jar of the author who penned the recommended list diary (whose title declared McCain’s campaign dead because of this. lol) garnering 638 recommends over a conflated issue that really did not exist.
Sure, it’s not the end of the world, but I think we can do better.