This post started out as an email thread between Erik, Mark, and Scott and then morphed into a full blown conversation that we thought was worth posting. Hopefully you’ll find it somewhat less than tedious, perhaps even useful, but at the very least entertaining.

Enjoy…

Scott: So, out of curiosity, I decided to run the numbers and of the 23 posts at the Dish today (November 17 @ 2:24pm MST), 13 are about Palin. That just seems creepy to me.

Erik: Totally creepy.

Mark: No doubt. Then again, the entire blogosphere seems to have an unhealthy obsession with Palin. Check out memeorandum. I count no fewer than 14 Palin-related headlines at the moment, and I think it was even more yesterday. Sully’s just the worst among equals it would seem.

(Sadly, Mark couldn’t participate after this due to professional obligations. Next time!)

Scott: Palinmania is the most morbidly fascinating phenomenon to hit US politics since Monica Lewinski. It’s like a train wreck that is dying to be seen as culturally significant by all of it’s true believers who are going down with the flames. The question is whether it is a sincere movement or just a novel blip. Andrew could be helping to determine that quandary, instead he’s simply muddying the waters by not just believing, but hyping the hype.

Oh, for a William F. Buckley of the twenty-first century…

Erik: It’s symptomatic of our current political discourse. On the one hand, many typically thoughtful conservatives like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat almost had to support her in order to remain part of the conservative movement (whereas truly dissident conservatives like Larison took a very different approach). Meanwhile, liberals can use her to their advantage since even the most thoughtful of their intellectual opponents have to at least mildly support her for now. It’s just personality politics taken to its monstrous conclusion.

Scott: Which prompts the question: is politics inherently glib?

[Read more →]

Few bloggers have had quite as controversial a career as Little Green Football’s Charles Johnson.  Johnson began blogging in earnest back in 2001 after the attacks on the twin towers, and continues putting out content at a furious pace nearly a decade later.

He is perhaps best known for playing a key role in the resignation of CBS’s Dan Rather following the forged Killian document scandal.  He also played a role in bringing attention to altered photographs in the Adnan Hajj photographs controversy. In July 2008, LGF identified that photographs of Iran’s nuclear missile test had been altered.

More recently, Johnson has locked spears with many on the right over issues such as Obama’s birth certificate, creationism in schools, and “Obama Derangement Syndrome.”

He helped found the popular new media site, Pajamas Media, though he has since fallen out with the publishers and, as of September, has removed all links from Little Green Footballs to Pajamas Media.

I had a chance to exchange emails with Charles Johnson about his experience as a blogger and the current state of affairs on the war on terror and the conservative blogosphere. [Read more →]

Read Reihan, Ramesh, and Ruffini. [Read more →]

Conor Friedersdorf is a name that one increasingly sees popping up around various points in the blogospheric highways and biways. Whether guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, writing pieces for the quickly rising Daily Beast, being railed against by radio talkshow host Mark Levin, or offering insights and analysis via his home digs at The American Scene and True/Slant, Conor’s is a name on the move.

Some folks have come to know of Conor through his mix ups with big name conservatives like Mark Levin and Andrew Brietbart without also familiarizing themselves with an essay he wrote called Electric Kool Aid Conservatism for the American’s Future Foundation Doublethink Online (and catching the eye of C11 Managing Editor Joe Carter, which helped to land Conor the gig wherein I became familiar with his work) wherein Conor laid out the need for an increase in conservative journalists as opposed to conservative activists. It struck me that no analysis of Conor’s recent work could really be called complete without also looking at Electric Kool Aid Conservatism.

As a result, I emailed Conor to see if he would be game for conducting an interview on that and hios newest project The GOP Speaks. Graciously, Conor agreed.

Check out the transcript after the jump. [Read more →]

No one is above the outrage cycle. We have now, in our culture, synthesized the two worst elements of pre-9/11 and post-9/11 media: the pre-9/11 obsession with meaningless bullshit; and the post-9/11 obsession with filling every story with apocalyptic portent and over the top, tween-girl-at-a-Jonas-brothers-concert hysteria.

We still care too much about J-Lo’s dress and the Summer of the Shark. Now, we get around the idea that we are shallow for giving a shit about such things by infusing them with pseudo-political importance and our current national drug of choice, outrage. Everything is an outrage. Everyone is outraged. Every turn of the news cycle gives us a new opportunity to pound the table. Every item that crawls across the newsfeed at the bottom of our screens is an excuse to stab one’s finger into one’s chest and declaim, solemnly and with vast consequence, “I, for one, am sickened.” This is how a shallow culture convinces itself that it is deep.

-Freddie DeBoer

So Rush Limbaugh is not going to be able to own a piece of an NFL team.  Let us all rejoice.  Or whine about the outrageous politicization of the bastion of innocence that is professional sports.   What is important is that we all either rage against the coming apocalypse this portends or celebrate the saving of the world at the zero hour that it means.

Sure, the idea of bringing in a man who accuses blacks of wanting to re-impose segregation to be a significant minority owner of a team in a league that is 65% African-American made about as much business sense as having Al Sharpton sponsor a PGA Tournament.  It is outrageous and offensive to every racially sensitive American that such a man would even be considered for such a socially meaningful position as minority owner of an NFL franchise so sacred that Cleveland, Los Angeles, Anaheim, and St. Louis have all claimed it as their own over the last 70 years.  And goddammit, the delicious irony of a man who proudly proclaims himself a stalwart of limited government owning a piece of a brazenly rent-seeking and taxpayer subsidized professional sports team simply cannot be so much as imagined in this era of humorless, self-congratulatory outrage.

Of course, the outrage of allowing such a man to be included as a minority partner in a group that may someday decide to c0nsider making an offer on a blessed professional sports franchise is exceeded only by the far greater outrage of suggesting that Limbaugh might not be someone with whom the not-at-all image-conscious NFL wants to associate.  Never mind that Limbaugh is an extraordinarily polarizing figure whose views are well-known to wide swathes of the NFL’s fan base (and players), and might therefore be a bit of a drag on the league’s profits.  No, instead it is truly outrageous and offensive that a profit-seeking enterprise would choose profits over granting an opportunity for a much-oppressed radio talk show host to join its Good Old Boys club.  Even more outrageous is that people would object to such a kind soul being invited to maybe someday decide to consider making an offer on the Holy St. Louis Rams after one of the dozens of racially-charged statements this man has made in recent years turns out to be of dubious sourcing.  After all, it was clearly that dubiously-sourced quote, and only that dubiously-sourced quote, that drove profit-seeking NFL owners to object to Limbaugh’s entry into their prestigious club after decades of discrimination against wind bags.

These outrages, however, are not enough to satisfy our craving.  What is necessary is to demonstrate how they are evidence of an even bigger, undebatably apocalyptic outrage.  Clearly, that outrage is our state-controlled media,* and the punishment of speech.

So sally forth and be outraged.  Or not.  Just so long as you were outraged yesterday or today or will find something new to be outraged about tomorrow, and understand that today the Single Most Important Thing In The World is whether Rush Limbaugh will be invited to be reinvited to maybe join in some way a group that may someday soon decide to propose to buy the St. Louis Ronald Reagan Rams of the United States of America, Puppies, Babies, and All That Is Good and Holy In This World.

*Seriously – “state-controlled media”?  Rush has reached the point where he is indistinguishable from Alex Jones.  How long until he starts making daily rants about the Bildebergers, fluoridated water, and Roswell?

I read Steven Hayward’s article on intellectual conservatism with some interest, mainly because I thought Hayward – as a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard – would have enough movement credibility to convincingly argue that talk radio populists aren’t conservatism’s best standard bearers. The substance of this critique has been around for awhile, and anyone who frequents this site is probably already familiar with the case against Happy Meal Conservatism. Hayward’s article, however, seems tailor-made for a skeptical audience – unlike perennial talk radio-bashers David Frum or Andrew Sullivan,  he is incredibly (some would say overly) solicitous of the Becks and Limbaughs of the world. The piece makes no mention of Beck’s questionable history, praises his “intellectual curiosity,” and readily acknowledges the importance of conservatism’s populist roots.

So it was depressing to hear the exact same epithets that are routinely hurled at a Sullivan or a Frum directed at Hayward, who was immediately derided as elitist and out of touch with the movement’s grassroots for criticizing conservative populism. The closest I’ve come to finding an actual refutation of Hayward’s arguments is from Redstate’s Erick Erickson, who seems to have given up on defending the conservative movement’s intellectual bona fides in favor of denying that a lack of carefully thought-out policy ideas is a problem in the first place.

It is not surprising to read the Right’s vituperative reaction to, say, David Brooks’ latest column on talk radio. Whatever his faults, Brooks, at least, has never been a movement hack. But if people aren’t willing to give someone like Hayward a respectful hearing, I wonder what it will take to convince the base that following Levin, Limbaugh and Beck off a cliff isn’t a blueprint for conservative revival. At this point, one suspects that if Glenn Beck renounced his talk radio populism tomorrow, he would immediately be dismissed as a traitorous elitist.

Update: at the first Over Cigars informal conversation, I give a bit more of an explanation (albeit a short one) around the impetus for this post, why I’m not against Limbaugh, Beck, et al, per se, and yet why I remained concerned about the dynamics behind their current influence.

I’ll try to update again tonight on this post addressing some of the good points commenters have made (busy day).

Via Sullivan and Yglesias, I see that various talking heads of the right seem to have initiated the age old dance of cannibalism,

“I don’t rally people and haven’t since the first year of my radio show,” he wrote to POLITICO. “At that time, all local talk hosts were attempting to prove their worth by getting people to cut up gasoline credit cards, call Washington, etc. I thought it was cheap and disingenuous. The few times I did, early on, suggest people call Washington, the reaction to it from the media was that the response was not genuine (I shut down the House switchboard) because people only did what they did because ‘Limbaugh told them to.”

As well as, and more explicitly,

“To say [McCain] would be worse [than Obama] is mindless, mindless, incoherent as a matter of fact. [...] I think there’s enormous confusion and positioning and pandering. It may be entertaining, but from my perspective, it’s not. It’s pathetic,”

It would be easy, of course, to sit on the sidelines and take in the sights with a bowl of popcorn in hand, but I think there is a larger dynamic at play here that warrants consideration. Namely, your choice of old adages that either, “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” or, “Things will always get worse, before they get better.” Each means essentially the same thing, so take your pick, but it strikes me that beyond the kind of jeering that a tripartite battle between Levin, Limbaugh, and Beck  would obviously draw from some corners, the intra-nature of the fighting is an important sign to those of us ever disgruntled with personality based politics. [Read more →]

I see this story percolating through the left side of the blogosphere today.  It seems to be missing the context necessary to accurately interpret what Limbaugh was actually saying, which was a different kind of crazy than alleged, though just as explicitly vile.

If you’ve been following the movement Right’s reaction to this story, you’d understand that one of their central themes has been that this incident shows that in Obama’s America, white people are legally second-class citizens.  In their bizarre world, this bus incident was a hate crime, and the refusal to consider it as such is proof that the law doesn’t apply with equal force to white people.  As or even more disturbingly, they are also claiming that liberals are actively supporting the notion that the victim deserved what he got because he was trying to sit in the “black” part of the bus. 

Given that context, and given the full transcript of Limbaugh’s insanity, it’s pretty clear that Limbaugh was not actually advocating racially segregated busing.  What he was instead doing was claiming that the Left and Obama are advocating racially segregated busing of a sort. 

This is yet another step down the Right’s obsession with creating totally unsupportable claims of racial victimization of white people.  This obsession may well be a form of racism in and of itself, but it takes a different form than “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”  The form instead is “Don’t let TEH BROWN PEOPLE impose segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever on us decent and law-abiding whites!”  And yes, it really is that deranged.

Guess what?  Talk radio hosts and cable tv stars like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck say crazy, paranoid, flame-baiting, stupid, awful things.  Surprise!

They do it for the ratings.  It’s a ploy that is very, very successful.  It works on the right a lot better than on the left for sociological reasons beyond my understanding.  It makes the television and radio broadcasters a great deal of money.  It makes the stars a great deal of money.  And they get fantastic pulpits from which they can grind out their populist ire, churning up whatever angst or fear already exists amongst the grassroots fans who adore them.  They lie, they exaggerate, they race-bait and call names.  They represent the lowest form of debate.

And it’s high time we stopped talking about them.  [Read more →]

Matthew Schmitz wants counter-conservatives to stop attacking the right-wing talk radio pundits:

If the goal of Conor and others who have attacked talk radio is to save the Republican Party,  I’m at a loss as to how this helps. By going after these talk radio personas, they are merely raising their profiles as the embattled defenders of “authentic” conservatism. Having Rush’s face on the cover of Newsweek, especially for a very negative article, only increases his reputation among his supporters and his legend among media types. It does much, much less to help the Republican Party, conservatism, or anyone else other than David Frum, who can build a reputation as the anti-Rush.  If Frum and Friedersdorf do want a conservatism that can win again, I think they would be well-advised to find enemies who do not have everything to gain by being attacked.

If Rush and Levin (et al) didn’t already have extremely high profiles then I might agree with this analysis.  As it stands, the much less well known figures like Conor, Frum, and Dreher are hardly likely to raise their profiles as “the embattled defenders of ‘authentic’ conservatism.”  Indeed, such dust-ups are more likely to raise the profiles of Conor, Frum and Dreher.

Either way, it can’t hurt to try.  Just doing nothing is simply not enough.  While Rush and Beck and Levin may indeed be their own worst enemies, it never hurts to point out why they’re wrong and how conservatives can, and should, do better.

Beyond this, it seems that the very self-destruction that Rush and co. are engaging in is, if anything, spurred along by in-fights with other conservatives like Frum.  We can already see how the right is devolving into irrelevance by promoting their pundit class – and hugely unpopular former vice presidents – as the standard bearers of the movement.  Forcing them to do battle in public may bolster their reputation with the fast-dwindling base, but it will at the same time reveal that there are indeed conservatives out there who have something to say that’s worth listening to, beyond merely attacking the leaders of the current conservative movement.  And it forces them into that awkward position of not only being opposed by those damned liberals, but by conservatives as well.  A lot of voters don’t realize that they have a choice – that other forms of conservatism exist outside and beyond the movement.

The saying goes, all publicity is good publicity – but I’d say that’s only true if you happen to be rather obscure to begin with.  If you’re already on the top of the world, like Rush, you should think about another cliche – what goes up, must come down….

Update.

James Poulos accuses Mark Levin of bad postmodernity.  Truly, Poulos has stepped over the line this time….

(h/t Dreher)

Or questioning the extent of his audience. Or his talent for talk radio. Or any of that stuff. I mean, seriously. The point – restated here with more patience than I could ever muster under similar circumstances – is that he’s an awful spokesperson for the movement, a polarizing figure who turns off independents and dissident righties, and that, having annointed himself Keeper of the Sacred Texts of the One True Faith (No R.I.N.O.s in these Gospels!), he continues to quash any hint of original thinking. But other than that, he’s a great entertainer. On a related note, Conor Friedersdorf’s thoughts on the subject are not only worth reading, he’s also won the highly-coveted “best title for a blog post” award for the month of May.

It occurred to me last night how overblown this whole Rush Limbaugh CPAC speech has really become. I mean, Rush Limbaugh has been an influential figure within the conservative movement for more than a decade now; he has spoken his mind and had a certain proportions of the population respond with nodding and shaking heads, respectively. And frankly, nothing has changed. The speech that Rush Limbaugh gave at CPAC was, as far as I can tell, a pretty standard issue Rush speech (no teleprompter necessary).

So how is it that by standing up in front of the attendees of CPAC and giving one of his standard speeches did Rush Limbaugh suddenly become the leader of the conservative movement? The fact of the matter is that he didn’t, but claiming that he did made for some good chatter about the Right. Rush’s ascendancy to leadership was, almost entirely, a fiction of the chattering class. And not surprisingly, those of us who want to be on top of what is going on got caught up in the story (me included).

Rush certainly never referred to himself as the leader of the conservative movement. And in fact, Limbaugh most often referred to himself as a “part” of the conservative movement, a conservative among conservatives. Granted, Limbaugh is a particularly well known conservative whose views are well listened to, but again, there’s nothing different there than there was two weeks ago.
So, in large part, I think E.D. was right not to feel compelled to comment about Rush’s speech and the frenzy it produced. Magpie-ism is one of the challenges we must learn to overcome in our practice of politics.

Meanwhile, back at CPAC someone who once was the leader of the conservative movement and may well stand in a realistic position to grab those reins again in some form took the stage: Newt Gingrich. [Read more →]