The Onslaught of the Bloggers, Slay the Dragon!

Blog-o-rama

I have often said this and I preach it anywhere and everywhere i go. The net, the blogosphere is the future of all media, replicating the media landscape of Lincoln. For as much harm as it can do (ie spreading the deadly poison of radical islam, disseminating critical info on bombmaking, nuclear site info etc), I believe it will serve a much greater good. The 2004 presidential election was an indication but just the tip of the iceberg.The Blogosphere changed the course of the election. The Swift boat boys, the Powerline and Charles Johnson/Little Green Footballs expose of RATHERGATE........... this in IMHO changed the course of human events.........if not for the blogboys the chances are pretty damn good that sKerry/annan/chirac would be in the Whitehouse selling this constitutional republic down the river like a $2 dollar whore

My only problem with the emergence of the bloggers from behind the curtainof anonymity is the "explanation""presentation" pf the blogosphere to the American people. The American People want to know WTF a blogger is. And who has been given the designated task of enlightening thr American people? THE MENDACIOUS MSM! HA! Think about it, thats like Kofi Annan leading the investigate into Oil for food (actually that is happening). or the French leading the investigation into the pedophiliac sex crimes of french UN "peace" keeping forces. When the MSM describes the blogs, they paint a marginal, eccentric, obnoxious, misinformed motley crew of losers (ie KOS, DU, Wonkette) sitting home scratching their asses in their pyjamas. Who could possibly take this movement seriously with MOE LARRY AND CURLY as the face of Blogdom? Never do you see the true brilliant giants of the blogoshere ie Powerline, Little Green Footballs, Russell Maddens, Instaepundit web ring, (or Atlas Shrugged) for that matter. And some of us wear La Perla!
NOT TO WORRY, WE SHALL OVERCOME!

By JAMES TARANTO

Hair of the Blog
On the merits of the Eason Jordan kerfuffle, we defer to our colleague Bret Stephens, who was there, and who was the first journalist to write about it, in the Jan. 28 issue of OpinionJournal's Political Diary (subscribe here). Still, there's no gainsaying the victory that Jordan's critics in and out of blogdom, who pursued the story relentlessly in the two ensuing weeks, won when Jordan announced on Friday night that he was leaving CNN.

"After 23 years at CNN, I have decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq," Jordan said in a letter to colleagues that CNN itself quotes (in a story that oddly runs under the heading of ENTERTAINMENT).

Bloggers of a different stripe consummated a victory over the weekend as the Democratic National Committee elected Screaming Blue Messiah Howard Dean as its new chairman. (We've included the photo nearby, sent in by reader and blogger Kevin Schmidt, as a bit of 2004 campaign nostalgia.)

The New Republic's Ryan Lizza has a fascinating account of how "a guerrilla squad of Democratic bloggers" knocked down every other contender for the post. An example is ex-Rep. Tim Roemer of Indiana, who had the backing of Harry Pelosi and Nancy Reid:

The entire field of candidates, in concert with the insular liberal blogosphere, rose up and destroyed Roemer.

The hit was silent and deadly. One day I received by messenger a dirty and smudged envelope with no return address. Inside were five pages of anti-Roemer opposition research about his positions on everything from Israel and abortion to labor and Social Security. The same information was fed to numerous blogs, which quickly declared Roemer anathema. "Unless Roemer publicly, loudly, and completely repudiates his recent [pro-privatization] position on Social Security, he is utterly unacceptable as DNC chair," said a post on the pro-Dean site MyDD.com, which served as a key clearinghouse of information about the race. (Roemer did repudiate that position, but it wasn't enough.)

By the time Roemer showed up on "This Week" for a Sunday morning announcement of his candidacy, which, in the old days, might have helped solidify him as the establishment choice, he was badly damaged. He spent most of his interview with George Stephanopoulos defensively responding to bloggers he had clearly never heard of, like MyDD and The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum. . . .

Roemer never recovered. In St. Louis days later, at one of five candidate forums held around the country for DNC members to interview the aspiring chairs, Roemer rose and, glaring at Dean and candidate Simon Rosenberg, lashed out at the "secret e-mails" that were circulating about him. He angrily defended his pro-life record and testily challenged the DNC members to show some tolerance on the issue. It was a brave speech, but it was also the end of his candidacy. Applause was scattered and perfunctory. In New York the next week, he told DNC members, "We shouldn't let a special interest group decide our view on choice." This time, the audience hissed.

What's interesting here isn't the medium--the rise of bloggers is old news--but the message. In a column presumably filed before Jordan quit, U.S. News & World Report's Michael Barone contrasts the Howard Dean ascendancy with the Dan Rather scandal:

What hath the blogosphere wrought? The left blogosphere has moved the Democrats off to the left, and the right blogosphere has undermined the credibility of the Republicans' adversaries in Old Media. Both changes help Bush and the Republicans.

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