And for every stunt, prop, half-truth, or trick pulled by the Kerry campaign that the rightist blogs exposed, I can point you to something dumb, fake, misleading, or false the Bush campaign did that the leftist blogs exposed. I read both throughout the campaign. The most remarkable thing about blogs and the 2004 campaign was just how ready formerly independent voices on both sides were willing to spew out official campaign talking points, eschew criticism of their own guy, and otherwise fell into line in order to get their man elected. Both candidates were deeply flawed. If you ask me, the story of the year with respect to blogs and the campaign was how readily the allegedly-independent blogosphere became an apparatchik -- just another campaign tool, really -- for either party.Posted by Ryan Olson at January 06, 2005 01:12 PM
Hmm. That's a really good observation, isn't it?
Posted by: G Zombie on January 6, 2005 09:57 PMYeah. During the lead up to the campaign I stopped reading a whole lot of blogs that I used to read. I used to like a lot of the right-leaning folks, mostly because they seemed libertarian-ish and able to criticize both sides. Then the campaign started up and everybody fell into line, pumping up Bush and tearing down Kerry at any opportunity.
I ended up gravitating to the blogs that never had any pretense of objectivity. If I'm going to read talking points over and over, at least I'll get them from the real partisans.
Posted by: Ryan O. on January 7, 2005 09:08 AMpartisanship is good....
"Independence" in a blog (or anywhere else, for that matter) is at best severely overrated and at worst a flat-out lie. 99.99998% of all people at least lean one way or the other, left or right, and in an election like this last one -- where the parties were polar opposites -- the choice became very stark, very fast. I'm no doctrinaire Republican, but the thought of a Kerry presidency made me cringe. I'm sure that the thought of a second Bush term made a lot of nominal Democrats cringe, too, and thus the tone of the rhetoric on both sides got very partisan very quickly (remember "Anybody But Bush?" Well, once conservatives-in-name-only got a look at the excesses of the Kerry backers -- box seats at the convention for Michael Moore, for example, and pretty much everything about MoveOn.org -- they jumped on the "At Least He's Not Kerry" bandwagon and started backing Bush).
Now that it's over, the "independents" are going to go right back to their "independent" ways, sniping at health-care policy or whatever like the election never happened (while all the while loudly trumpeting their superior intellect and moral virtue and openness of mind, undoubtedly). Sorry to sound so bitter here, but "independent" voters/bloggers/columnists piss me off about as much as "nonpartisan" voter registration drives/think tanks. To me, both are the political equivalent of a chick shooting you down by saying "I don't want to mess up our friendship by dating you."
Posted by: severian on January 7, 2005 01:19 PM|
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