Citation du Jour

From Glenn Greenwald we get this gem from John Yoo (who worked in the Bush Administration's Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel) at an April 18 Civil Liberties debate:

[Since 9/11] we have had outpourings of new political speech through new methods and means, for example, uh, people I wish never existed -- bloggers.

'God damned well informed citizens reading and thinking and writing and having opinions. Don't they know their place?'

Just so you know, John, the feeling is mutual.

John Yoo Bush Administration Bloggers

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you...

then they fight you, then you win," at least according to Ghandi

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Blog Mob
"Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."

BY JOSEPH RAGO
Wednesday, December 20, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Blogs are very important these days. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one. The invention of the Web log, we are told, is as transformative as Gutenberg's press, and has shoved journalism into a reformation, perhaps a revolution.

The ascendancy of Internet technology did bring with it innovations. Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there's more of it, because anybody can chip in. There's more "choice"--and in a sense, more democracy. Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the "MSM," for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

So what you're saying is, effectively, we're just not as good as you are.

I'm willing to accept that not every blog is grammatically correct. Hell, this one has spelling errors! Not every blog engages in perfect logic, but then again neither does any politician. Our prose may not be top flight, but the President can't for sentences.

You're right, we do traffic mostly in pronouncements, we are reliant on the 'MSM' and we are more about opinion than we are about reporting. There's a good reason for that, though. We aren't being paid to blog. Sure, if I was making a good salary from blogging, I could quite my real job and make an effort but because we have other jobs (and no editor or other support staff) our ability to go out and investigate or conduct interviews is practically non-existent.

And Joe, here's the irony you can't find in our pitiful little blogs:

You just spent 1000 words in the Wall Street Journal making sure everybody knew that you were more important than us. You clarified, once and for all, that the writing in a respected daily newspaper (with 29 Pulitzers) is more closely edited, that the range of reporting is far broader, the topics more varied, the language more flowery, and the content more factual and less opinionated.

That's all well and good, but your paper is shrinking the size of its broadsheet to save money and my readership is still growing while my cost remain constant.

You work at the Wall Street Journal, surely you can figure out what that means.


Joseph Rago Blog Mob Blogs Journalism

Old Media Lashes Out

Michael Kinsley's op-ed in today's Washington Post:

There is something about the Web that brings out the ego monster in everybody. It's not just the well-established tendency to be nasty. When you write for the Web, you open yourself up to breathtakingly vicious vitriol. People wish things on your mother, simply for bearing you, that you wouldn't wish on Hitler.

But even in their quieter modes, denizens of the Web seem to lug around huge egos and deeply questionable assumptions about how interesting they and their lives might be to others.

This is strange. Anonymity, for better or for worse, is supposed to be one of the signature qualities of the Web. As that dog in the New Yorker cartoon says, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The Internet is a place where you can interact with other people and have complete control over how much they know about you. Or supposedly that is the case, and virtually everybody on the Internet is committed to achieving that goal.

[...]

There's an element of amiable self-parody about a lot of this that makes it bearable. Or is there? It's hard to tell. Surfing aimlessly, I stumbled upon a Web page that describes itself as "The definitive site for finding out 'What is Doug Doing?' " Doug himself writes: "So I know what you all are thinking . . . Doug never updates this!" Doug seems genuinely apologetic about not keeping us up to date on the minutiae of his life. For myself, I'm worried sick that the grad course and two music history courses Doug is taking this semester, which he says are driving him "a little crazy," may not leave him enough time to keep the page totally current. Remember your priorities, Doug, and don't let school get in the way of maintaining your Web site.

For the ultimate in solipsism, check out Twitter.com, a site where -- once you register -- you can answer the question "What are you doing?" At 7:47 am on Monday, for example, Lynda was going to get a glass of cold water.

This raises more questions than it answers. Did she get it? Was it cold enough? Tragically, we'll never know until someone starts a site about what you were doing before what you're doing now. Or possibly an interactive site about what you are going to do next after you finish doing what you're doing now. There could be multiple options. People could vote. Hey, someone call Google. We're rich!

As an interesting side note, the Washington Post usually includes a Technorati "Who's Blogging about This" section in the side bars of their articles. This article doesn't have one.

Here's my take: Nobody's forcing you to read "The definitive site for finding out 'What is Doug Doing?' " or visiting Twitter.com to engage in philosophical questions about glasses of cold water. And while I could argue that nobody's forcing me to buy the Washington Post, if I do buy the Post, (say for local sports) I am required to purchase a print copy of Michael Kinsley's opinion on writers that he thinks are less important than he is.

Mr. Kinsley hasn't used his space on one of the nation's leading opinion pages to condemn the web for the vitriol directed at student athletes (college and high school) or the lack of privacy for celebrities the web has created or make any other legitimate complaint about the Internet. He's used that space to tell everybody how he feels about who write for their own pleasure, for tiny (perhaps non-existent) audiences.

Mr. Kinsley spent some thousand words in a national newspaper telling us - peons in his eyes - that we should leave the writing to professionals.

I'm not here to defend the actions of Doug, Lynda, or anybody else. That said, looking the blogs of Myspace for the best writing the 'net has to offer is like looking to sports stadium concession stands for gourmet food. At a football game, a hot sausage with peppers and onions is exactly what you want and what you expect - but if you're looking for delicately balance flavors with creative texture and beautiful presentation, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Of course what Mr. Kinsley wanted was disappointment. It makes him feel important, knowing that his writing is the good kind of writing while all the unwashed masses out there can't cobble together a few sentences letting us know if the glass of water was cold enough, let alone discuss any of the great issues facing us as a nation.

Like 'self involved people' keeping online diaries.

Michael Kinsley

It's All My Fault

At least that's what George H. W. Bush said...

GRETA: You are a letter writer. Tons of letters.

H.W. BUSH: Not anymore. Because now I use the email. And the computer. And I find that I don’t do near as much writing as I used to, letters as I used to. I don’t save them. And I am worried about that a little bit not that I have that much more to say, but I think it’s too bad in a way that email will detract from the historical record of presidents. I don’t think that the President Bush uses email.

BARBARA BUSH: He doesn’t.

H.W. BUSH: You worry about it. People are going to subpoena the email records and we are going to, you know, you’ve gotta prove that you were telling the truth and all this stuff. I mean, it’s gotten so adversarial that it’s ugly.

GRETA: Why do you think it’s gotten so adversarial? Tonight is literacy. Everybody comes in from all different sides and wants to help. It seems like oftentimes in Washington, you know, on something we all want to work towards it’s not necessarily so civilized. It’s not so pleasant.

H.W. BUSH: It’s true but that’s not new really. I mean, you go back in history and you’ll find that there was always adversarial politics. There was always gut fighting. And it’s probably a little worse now given the electronic media and the bloggers and all these kinds of things. [Emphasis mine]

That's Bush talking to FoxNews last night. Nice to see that Dubya's avoiding 'the email' because it might be used to prove that he's a lying sack of shit.

I guess that Yale education wasn't a waste after all...

Bill O'Reilly Wants to Frag Bloggers

The transcript of last night's show, from Think Progress:

SABATO: It’s very personal. And you’ve mentioned the blogs earlier.

O’REILLY: Oh, it was off the chart.

LARRY SABATO: Well, we both have experienced this. The blogs on left and right, and I mean way left and way right, the things they come up with daily, the vitriol, the vile nature of the comments. And then they have hundreds and hundreds of people e-mailing.

O’REILLY: I know for a fact that President Bush doesn’t know what’s going on in the Internet. I know that for a fact because I did ask around.

SABATO: Well, he’s lucky.

O’REILLY: But.

SABATO: He’s lucky.

O’REILLY: He is lucky, because these are hired guns. These are people hired — being paid very well to smear and try to destroy people. And that’s the difference, Dr. Schiller. That had never happened before. I’ll give you the last word.

BROWN POLITICAL SCIENTIST WENDY SCHILLER: Well, I think that one thing is for sure. The millions of voters that go to the polls in 2006 aren’t spending most of their working hours during the day reading blogs on the Internet. They’re working for a living. They’re taking those kids to school. They’re going on with their lives. So yes, there’s a lot of vitriol out there. It’s a marketplace of ideas. It’s a free country last time we all checked. And it still is. It’s a great country.

O’REILLY: All right.

SABATO: It’s free for that reason.

O’REILLY: I think - I have to say President Bush has a much healthier attitude toward this than I do. Because if I can get away with it, boy, I’d go in with a hand grenade.

I'll just say this: Bill O'Reilly decrying the personal vitriol in political discourse is pretty much the definition of the pot calling the kettle black.

Additionally, if anybody knows where I can sign up to be a "hired gun" and get "paid very well" for blogging, please let me know.

Bill O'Reilly Blogs