My very good friend Maryscott O'Connor takes the a bait laid by Jonah Goldberg, hook, line and sinker:

[GOLDBERG:] IT'S IRONIC. At precisely the moment so many people think that the Republican Party and the conservative movement went off the rails, the people who hate the right the most want to copy it.

Me again, sorry. I just want to remind anyone reading this that I've been saying the same thing for years, now.

Only someone who truly does not understand what the Right is and how it became what it is could possibly write that. MSOC has allowed her rage at the Left blogs, a sentiment I share on the Iraq issue (which MSOC never writes about by the way, so I throw My Left Wing in with the failing Netroots on Iraq), to blind her to the obvious - the Right does not respect the truth, like them or not, the Left blogs do.

I addressed this issue regarding Jon Chait's article and MSOC is just as wildly wrong now as Chait was in his article on this point.

I'm swamped by work today, so here's an open thread.

Check out Big Tent's article in The Guardian on the netroots (a form of which was originally published here on TalkLeft)

There are some new diaries up as well:

• Mutiple Deployments To Iraq Breaking Our Military
• The Cabal
• Priming the Deadeye impeachment pump

Chris Bowers writes a couple of posts that seem to argue against striving for diversity in the progressive blogosphere. Chris writes:

[T]he famous and thoughtful Kid Oakland . . . wrote the following:

Of course we want diversity in the blogosphere. We want the blogs to reflect the party and the nation...not perfectly...but as much as possible.

I have to seriously ask--why? Since when is blogging such an incredibly important public institution, ala our education system, government or business world, that the entire public needs to be represented in it? I'd like to think blogging is that important, but it just isn't.

As Chris himself notes, he has not always been so dismissive of the importance of the progressive blogs, but let's leave that aside. For Chris goes further. Chris argues that striving for diversity in the progressive blogosphere would actually be harmful:

I could not more strongly disagree with Kid Oakland's statement that this is something we would even want. If every individual subset of the larger institution were equally diverse as the institution as a whole, then all of the niches and different functions that each subset fills would be entirely erased. . . .

Come again? Diversity in the progressive blogosphere would erase its function? Wow!

The AP "reported" the following:

Olbermann’s popularity and evolving image as an idealogue has led NBC News to stretch traditional notions of journalistic objectivity.

This line in an AP news article is, in itself, stretching traditional notions of journalistic objectivity past the breaking report. This sentence is an opinion, namely, the opinion of the Giuliani campaign repeated as a fact by an AP news report. It also misspells the word ideologue.

Can the Associated Press, after this egregious breach of journalistic ethics, continue to cover the Giuliani Presidential campaign?

Of course it can. It screwed up. It should admit its error and move on. Keith Olberman, by the way, did not screw up. He labelled his Special Comment um, a special comment, not news. AP did not label its editorializing as opinion. The AP needs a lesson in journalism it seems to me.

Finally, for the record, a lot of journalists give their opinions. It is a bad thing imo. It makes them famous, always bad for reporters. But the AP may consider whether it is just as bad when other journalists, including their own, engage in punditry and pontification when the decide to criticque Keith Olberman.

I forgot to do an open thread earlier this week, and I'll be at the jail most of the day, so here's a place for you to weigh in.

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Remember this story?

Sign on to www.gwbush.com and an altered, obviously fake image appears of a gleeful-looking Texas Gov. George W. Bush with a straw up his nose, inhaling white lines. Www.gwbush.com is not, needless to say, the official Bush campaign Web site (which is www.georgewbush.com).

And that's exactly the point, says the site's creator, Zack Exley, a 29-year-old computer programmer from Boston. Www.gwbush.com is so outlandish that anyone would spot it as a parody site, he says. . . . Bush's lawyers had warned Exley that he faced a lawsuit for his Web site's use of photos lifted from the copyrighted official Bush campaign site.

. . . Exley said Bush's intent is to intimidate and shut him down--a charge the Bush campaign denies. And Internet enthusiasts and free-speech advocates are closely monitoring the case because of its First Amendment implications.

In somewhat different circumstances, Barack Obama has, apparently, found control by someone not himself of the much renowned MySpace site, the one with the 160,000 "friends of Obama," objectionable. But unlike in the Bush situation, there is no question of cybersquatting, MySpace invoked its user agreement with Joe Anthony, the creator of the MySpace profile, and at the request of Obama, took the profile url away from Anthony and granted to it Obama.

First lesson of this episode? Don't build MySpace profiles of celebrities. MySpace will take them away from you at the request of said celebrities.

More lessons on the flip.

The varied reactions to Jon Chait's Netroots piece brings to mind "Rashomon." My initial reaction is here. Other reactions I would group as reacting to Chait's take on the political activism component, see Bowers, the Right/Left blogwars component, Atrios, the New Left purity reaction, see Booman, and the semi-pundit reactions, featured here by TNR, of Matt Yglesias and Eric Alterman.

Of the folks who were or might be defined as Netroots, Bowers for instance, I think he took personal affront to the idea that he was a propagandist and not someone who is more married to the truth than to his desired political outcome. I understand his reaction but he doth protest too much. There can be no doubt that the Netroots, Bowers, included, pay attention to the stories that are favorable for his desired outcomes while overlooking those that are not. We ALL do that. Certainly propagandist is not right, but the idea that he is not engaged in at the least, advocacy journalism that is not truly interested in telling the whole objective story, is rather silly. Chris admits as much in his wrapup sentence on the subject:

Chait's standard for what counts as propaganda is absurdly broad. Basically, he seems to imply that anyone who is interested in making any impact on politics is engaging in propaganda, because that person is no longer engaging in a purely disinterested pursuit of ideas.

Correct.

Jon Chait attempts an explanation of the Netroots for perplexed The New Republic readers. It is a quite good piece and Chait has some interesting things to say, but he gets a lot wrong. To me, this is his biggest mistake:

All the lessons the netroots have gleaned about U.S. politics were on display in this noxious denouement [the 2000 Post-Eloection Fight], and those lessons have been reinforced time and again throughout the Bush presidency. The Democratic leadership and the liberal intelligentsia seemed pathetic and exhausted, wedded to musty ideals of bipartisanship and decorousness. Meanwhile, what the netroots saw in the Republican Party, they largely admired. They saw a genuine mass movement built up over several decades. They saw a powerful message machine. And they saw a political elite bound together with ironclad party discipline.

It is not admiration that the Netroots expresses here. It is dealing with the reality of the situation. Chait mistakes understanding your political adversary, what you are up against, with admiration.

No one wants the nation so divided politically. Everyone wishes we could all be reasonable. But only a fool acts as if the world is how he wishes it to be. I have written about this in the past:

Episode 81 is tonight: "Chasing It."

This week, Tony hits an unlucky stretch and AJ makes a life-changing decision. Meanwhile, Vito's widow Marie turns to Tony for help with her troubled son.

Is AJ going to decide to join the mob?

I have been hard on the Left Blogs/so called "Netroots" lately on Iraq. My main reason is they have been wrong about it. But I have also been hard on them because it seemed to me they were abdicating a critical role the Left Blogs play in the political debate. I thnk Atrios explains that role nicely:

Overall what blogs have been able to do is create an unfolding political narrative which has been largely absent elsewhere. Sometimes it's about emphasizing different things, sometimes it's about combating DC conventional wisdom, sometimes it's about highlighting things which are being ignored. But taken all together it's about telling the story of politics in a different way.

When the Left blogs/Netroots decided to cheerlead the House Supplemental, playing the "pragmatic" insider, they ceded their real power in the debate. Move On and others simply failed to understand what their power is. It is not in settling for inadequate proposals and cheerleading inevitable compromises. It is describing the progressive postion and providing a narrative that keeps the Beltway, Media and politicians honest.

The Left Blogs/Netroots forgets this at its peril. If it goes down that road, and comes to resemble the Right blog relationship with the GOP in its relationship with the Democratic Party, it will be considerably weakened as a force in the political debate.

I've got court all afternoon so feel free to take over and direct the conversation.