Stars in Their Courses

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I got into a disagreement with someone yesterday in a TAPPED comment thread on the matter of astrology. Astrology is in the blog buzz these days because someone discovered Jerome Armstrong once practiced political astrology (or still does, but is keeping quiet about it). A rumor that Jerome also used astrology to choose stocks is making the rounds, but this may not be accurate.

Billmon writes,

Not content with picking through Jerome Armstrong’s dirty laundry at the SEC — at a time when he is expressly forbidden from talking about the case — the werebunnies of Right Blogistan and TNR (is there a difference any more?) plus Mickey Kaus, who flunked out of wererabbit basic training, are having themselves a gay old time making fun of Jerome’s interest in astrology, which I gather he has used in the past to pick stocks, or forecast political trends, or both — I’m not clear.

Nor do I particularly want to be. I’m very familiar with the practice of forecasting financial price trends based on charts of what are essentially random numerical patterns. But on Wall Street they call this “technical analysis,” and they pay thousands of guys millions of dollars to practice the art — even though any number of scientific studies have shown that it works about as well as astrology. (If it did work, the technical traders would own the world by now.) So irrational behavior by an ex-stock picker doesn’t seem like much of a scoop to me.

Like I told the commenter at TAPPED, I don’t see the scandal. Practicing astrology may be stupid, or delusional, or crazy, or a great many other adjectives, but by itself I don’t consider it unethical. If, hypothetically, someone were selling financial advice and telling his clients that the advice was based on in-depth analysis of profits or discounted cash flow or some such, but he was really using astrology, that would be unethical. But if he’s upfront about the astrology thing, what the hell. You pay your money and you take your chances. I’ve heard of people who successfully choose stocks by taping the newspaper stock market section to a corkboard and throwing darts at it.

Once upon a time I couldn’t stand to hear anyone talk about astrology without jumping in and proclaiming how dumb it is. But now I am older and either wiser or more demented; take your pick. I have cleared my head of opinions and judgments. If someone tells me he decided not to take a plane flight because there was a Grand Cross over the airport at the time of departure, I no longer feel an urge to lecture him on his credulity. Likewise, if someone tells me he thinks astrology is bunk, that’s fine with me. Whatever.

I’ve never seen empirical evidence that astrology forecasts specific events, like plane crashes or election results, any better than flipping coins or throwing darts. But I’ve known a few people who were deeply into astrology and who were brilliant at using it to predict general trends. In these cases, I suspect the astrologer (consciously or not) uses star charts to jog intuition. In other words, interpreting star patterns might be helping the astrologer access something he already knows, or believes, at some sub-cognitive level.

Knowing something without knowing you know it isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound. Maybe you’ve had the experience of reading a book or hearing a lecture, when something you read or hear causes an understanding, or realization, to pop into the forefront of your brain. And you recognize that this little eureka had been in your head for a while, but it had been a fuzzy thing dangling at the edge of cognition that you’d overlooked. It took someone else’s words to give it clarity and bring it to your full attention.

Another example: These days we nearly always use the word myth as a synonym for fallacy, but myths, it is argued, can be interpreted allegorically as windows to the psyche, or guides to truths that defy articulation. “For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious,” Thomas Mann said. Dismissing myths because they aren’t historically or literally true misses the point of them.

I’ve come to appreciate that literalness and truth are not at all the same thing, but I’ve yet to be able to explain why that’s so to someone who doesn’t already get it. The ability to realize truth outside of language or conceptual knowledge seems to come naturally to some people but baffles others, possibly depending on how their brains are wired.

Back to astrology — does “believing in” astrology require believing that events here on earth are caused by the alignments of planets and stars many light years away? I don’t think so, but then just because something isn’t literally true doesn’t make it worthless. If interpreting a star chart — or reading tea leaves, or chicken bones, or the I Ching — causes someone to access depths of intuition he couldn’t get to otherwise, I say there’s some value in that.

And if all of this leaves you cold, that’s fine, but you don’t have to get hostile about it. Think of it as a harmless quirk, like saving gum wrappers or eating eggs with ketchup.

This forecast posted in December 2002 was linked to by Garance Franke-Ruta as a shocking example — she called it “Armstrong’s analysis of the causes of 9-11.” However, it’s not about the causes of 9/11. Rather, it’s about the subconscious impulses driving people, mostly President Bush, in a particular direction. The section subtitled “Bush, Republicans, and Varuna” proved to be accurate in many ways. However, I don’t believe it says anything that people weren’t already suspecting in December 2002 without using astrology. And whatever was going on with Pluto and Bush’s south node doesn’t seem to have tripped him up in the 2004 election.

On the other hand, these predictions for likely Democratic presidential candidates, also made in December 2002 by another astrologer, are pretty darn close — well, except for the Kerry section — and I don’t think these predictions could have been constructed from conventional wisdom in December 2002. This is either one amazing astrologer, or she opened the file last year and re-wrote the predictions. I can’t tell. But if this really is what the lady predicted in 2002, look for John Edwards to be a factor in 2008.

Bank Shot

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Glenn Greenwald has published a post called ” The Bush lynch mob against the nation’s free press” that I recommend highly.

Much of the post discusses calls to prosecute the New York Times for treason because of its recent disclosure of the Bush bank-transaction-tracking program. There are a couple of points I want to add to Glenn’s post.

First off, let’s be clear about what is wrong with the Bush program. Last Friday Jonathan Turley appeared on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown show, and he explained it clearly (emphasis added):

OLBERMANN: Joining me now to assess just how much of a legal thing it is to do, constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University.

And we meet again on this subject.

JONATHAN TURLEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: Every week.

OLBERMANN: E-mails, international phone calls, domestic phone calls, databanks of phone records, now bank records. Do you buy the legality of this newest one?

TURLEY: Well, it‘s comforting to know that somewhere in government, each of our lives is organized in a file, from your banking records to your e-mails. I can only hope you get a copy at some point.

But, you know, this raises the same type of questions. Most importantly, the absence of congressional authorization. You know, the president is allowed to enforce the laws, he‘s not allowed to make them. He requires authorization from Congress. This is a constant theme.

And when Secretary Snow says the American people expect us to do things like that, unfortunately, it‘s true that every single week we have a new massive databank or a new, you know, surveillance program being revealed that has not been approved by Congress.

OLBERMANN: Yes, he may have said something, he may have said more than he knew in using that phrase, they—people expect us to do this.

But there‘s one difference with this one, Jon. Some of the banks didn‘t know this was happening. The government‘s not just messing with its own citizens here, it‘s messing with business. And if anybody in this country believes in privacy, and I think they call it proprietary information, it‘s businessmen. Are they going to fight the government in a way that ordinary citizens could not?

TURLEY: You know, Keith, they might, because if you remember, if we go back a couple weeks to an earlier disclosed program, the telecom scandal, that we found out that various telephone companies were giving information, telephone numbers, by American citizens to the United States government. And the response was a considerable backlash. Many customers were not happy, particularly when they found out that one company said, No, said, This is not something you can do under the law, and told the administration, Show me your authority. And the administration simply refused to do so.

Now, you may see a similar backlash from these banks, and saying, you know, We have a business to do here, we have a system of laws. If you‘re going to have some type of massive program like this, then go to Congress, and let‘s talk about it. You can do it in a classified setting.

But in this case, all we know is that some members of the intelligence committees were informed. Under this law they‘re citing, AIEPA (ph), he was only supposed to use this authority for a brief time, in an emergency. He was then supposed to go back to Congress to get real authority. Instead, he just kept on mentioning it to the same oversight members, who did nothing about some of these other programs.

OLBERMANN: Tell me, lastly, here about the term with which we started this segment, the secret administrative subpoena, not even reviewed by a judge nor a grand jury. What‘s the secret administrative subpoena business?

TURLEY: Well, I think they‘re talking about national security letters, which is basically what it sounds like, a letter claiming national security. But the thing I love is that Secretary Snow and his associates have said, Look, we did have oversight. It wasn‘t Congress, it wasn‘t the court. We went out and hired a private company, and they did the oversight, they protected your civil liberties.

This is (INAUDIBLE) outsourcing the Constitution. We—it‘s something that is almost laughable that they believe oversight is that they looked at themselves and felt good about it, and then they hired a private company, and they pretty good too.

OLBERMANN: Well, if you have a low threshold for feeling good about yourself, I guess you can do that, you can get that from a company or from your own picture of yourself, no matter how distorted it might be in the mirror.

George Washington University law professor, constitutional law expert, Jonathan Turley, great thanks for joining us. And I‘m certain we‘re going to be talking about something like this again soon.

TURLEY: Thanks, Keith.

OLBERMANN: Thank you, sir.

In sum, I don’t believe this is primarily a civil liberties issue, but more a breach of separation of powers issue. I bring that up because on last night’s Hardball I observed (until the channel was, mercifully, changed) Al Sharpton and some wingnut woman radio personality “debate” this issue, and neither one of them had a clue what he or she was talking about. Sharpton argued that the program violates civil liberties, and I suspect it probably does, but I don’t think we know enough detail to prove that it does. On the other hand, there’s no question the Bushies are in violation of usurping power the Constitution gives to Congress.

The other point is one that Glenn makes — that there is, actually, nothing in the recent news stories that terrorists didn’t already know. Last night on Hardball, before the atrocious Sharpton-Whozits debate, Chris Matthews interviewed Ron Suskind (bless him!), David Ignatius, and Evan Thomas on the finance-tracking program. The transcript isn’t up yet at the MSNBC site, but probably will be in the next couple of hours. Anyway, I gather from the converation that at least some of the “new” information published by the New York Times is also in Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine. I have only barely started reading it and haven’t gotten to that part yet, but I think the relevant section begins on page 141.

[Update: The MSNBC Hardball transcript is here. The interview with Suskind, Ignatius and Thomas is the first thing in the program. ]

Suskind et al. concurred that the terrorists have known about this program for a long time and have pretty much stopped using financial institutions to transfer money. These days the terrorists are mostly sending cash from here to there by way of couriers, they said. This has slowed them down a bit, but it isn’t stopping them.

For a whole lot more on this topic, read today’s Dan Froomkin column.

Update: Captain Ed misses the point. Again. Nobody is saying that the administration should not have been tracing terrorist financial transfers. (In fact, I am about 98 percent certain that the Clinton Administration tried to get a program like this going in the late 1990s, but Republicans in Congress shot it down. As I remember, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, now retired, was instrumental in the shootdown.) The problem (and how many times does this have to be explained?) is that the Bushies are operating without proper oversight.

Duh.

Update update: More from Jonathan Turley at Democracy Now!

Billmon Calls It

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Great minds thinking alike …

OK, so now I’ve given you all my disclaimers. But I still haven’t explained why I’m even talking about this stupid crap. The reason is what happened over the weekend: i.e. the major slime job in Newsweek, and David Brooks’ ridiculous column in the New Pravda. The campaign against Kos, which I’d originally dismissed as just another pissy TNR vendetta, is starting to look more and more like a coordinated effort: a Swiftboat operation. At the very least, it’s snowballing into a more systematic media attack on Left Blogistan, which makes it my fight as well as Kos’s.

I’m not suggesting Karl Rove (or some other GOP mastermind) is behind this, or even that there is some kind of cabal of neocon/dino democrat-leaning journalists orchestrating it. But the m.o. very much resembles the classic Swiftboat strategy: start some vague, unsourced allegations echoing in the blogosphere, then persuade your ideological allies in the corporate media to start firing on target — based on the flimsy excuse that “people are talking” about the “issue.” Rinse and repeat.

Exactly, although I still suspect that at least part of the pile-on is about discrediting candidates who are thought to be associated with Kos. The New Republic guys are buds with Joe Lieberman, after all …

This would actually be less ominous if the Rovians or their kind really were behind this. Political dirty tricks are nothing new, and we already know how the GOP and the right-wing blogs do their thing. In this case, however, it looks like Kos’s media critics have actually decided to go into the Swiftboating business themselves, instead of simply swallowing whatever regurgitated slop the political operatives and the “independent” advocacy groups drop into their gaping mouths.

The initial smear, after all, wasn’t incubated on just on any old blog, but on one tied directly to the apron strings of the Grey Lady herself — The New York Times, with another venerable publication, The New Republic, putting the echo in echo chamber. Then the mainstream jackals moved in, right on schedule. It does appear that somebody has been feeding driblets of derogatory information (including, apparently, a phony email) to sympathetic reporters. But if there are any political operatives involved (as opposed to journalists acting like political operatives) they’ve keep their tracks very well hidden. Call it the Immaculate Swiftboat.

Political operatives with a lot of buffers …

This is something new, or at least different from what we’ve become accustomed to. I think it highlights the speed with which the lapdogs of the so-called liberal media are evolving (or I should say devolving) into the watchdogs of the political status quo — in this case, the ossified and increasingly dysfunctional status quo within the Democratic Party. Kos, and his blog allies and followers, appear to have touched an extremely raw nerve with tribunes of modern neoliberalism (like neoconservatism, but without the strength of its convictions.) …

… Maybe it’s just a coincidence that the media attacks started almost as soon as Yearly Kos ended, but I doubt it. Either all that favorable media coverage pushed the pretty boys at the TNR and the Times over the edge, or somebody, as they say in Godfather II, pushed a button.

As Billmon says, there are several layers of hypocrisy to dig through. And I’m saying some of that hypocrisy is coming from the Left. From the fresh-off-the-farm innocents, or hair-shirt purists, who thought the Warner party whiffed off too much money — as I explained in this comment, Warner is a rich guy, and by a rich guy’s standards that party was the equivalent of cooking hamburgers in the back yard — to the ideologues who complain because Kos is all about winning elections for Democrats and won’t consider third party candidates. As Billmon says, Kos has never pretended to be other than a Democratic Party activist. This is not a crime.

Billmon continues,

The thing is, despite all hyperventilating about corruption and conflict of interest, I still don’t understand what Kos is supposed to have done wrong. He and Jerome were partners in a political consulting business back in 2004 (Suellentrop, as we’ve already seen, dredged up every backstabbing piece of office gossip from the Dean campaign.) Jerome still does consulting work, Kos does not. Jerome has some sort of contract with the Warner campaign, Kos does not. Warner threw a big party at Yearly Kos, and Kos has written favorably of Warner’s presidential aspirations at Daily Kos (although I read Daily Kos fairly regularly, and it’s not as if Kos has turned the place into Mark Warner Central.)

And . . . what? Well, nothing, it appears. If the TNR blogswarmers or anyone else have any evidence that Jerome and/or Warner has been passing money to Kos under the table, they’ve yet to produce it. And I think it’s fairly safe to say that if they had such evidence, it would be all over the New York Times by now.

I’m not sure whose idea it is that we bloggers are supposed to be neutral as far as candidates or parties are concerned. We’re just citizens expressing opinions. Whatever candidates a blogger chooses to endorse are his business. You can agree or disagree, but if bloggers aren’t supporting candidates you like, start your own bleeping blog.

Second, there seems to be some kind of unwritten code that we bloggers are supposed to be untainted by money, and that if any of us ever accepts money for doing some kind of work related to politics we have “sold out.” I’m sorry, but I didn’t take a vow of poverty when I started blogging. As long as the blogger is transparent about the relationship — puts a notice on his blog that “I’m currently a paid consultant for so-and-so,” I don’t see what the big deal is.

I will tell you honestly that I have been putting out the word that I’m available if some advocacy organization or candidate needs a web writer or speech writer or something, because I am not wealthy and one of these days I will need some income. I wouldn’t work for a candidate or group I dislike — that would be selling out — but if I could get paid for helping a good candidate or cause, I’d be thrilled.

Billmon continues,

I’m no Washington political insider, but I spent enough time on the fringes of that world to know that consultants — including ones with names like Carville, Shrum, Begala and Greenberg — often go into partnerships together, often back the same candidates as their former partners, and sometimes speak favorably of candidates their former partners are working for, even when they’re not really on the same wave length ideologically. This is what the political reporters like to call pragmatism, and for some strange reason Newsweek hasn’t seen fit to brand it as a form of payola, until just now.

It’s an incestuous world, and (to me at least) a deeply repugnant one. But it takes a keener sense of ethics than I possess to see where Kos has transgressed the unwritten code that seems so visible to his media critics — particularly since (did I mention this fact before?) he has never claimed to be anything other than (let me repeat this slowly so even the half wits in Right Blogistan can understand) a D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T-I-C P-A-R-T-Y A-C-T-I-V-I-S-T. And Daily Kos is a web site for Democratic Party activists. Not a newspaper. Not a foundation. Not a think tank. What section of unwritten SCLM code of ethics forbids Kos from endorsing candidates that Jerome works for? Or, for that matter, that Kos works for?

Billmon goes on to say that when elements in media and government who complain that we are a leftie fringe or out of control or turning corrupt, what really worries them is that we’re an emerging power they can’t control. The current pushback against blogs is a signal that we’re arriving. And it’s going to get uglier before it gets better.

Gassing Our Own People

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I hope you won’t mind my going back in time a bit, but lots of threads to the past are converging these days. Recently this post generated some comments about support given to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s by St. Ronald of Blessed Memory, even as Saddam was going through his “gassing the Kurds” phase. I was reminded of this episode again today. Murray Waas posts a lovely bit of writing at Huffington Post in which he explains why he dedicated himself to exposing the Reagan-Bush I support for Saddam and his war machine. He also speaks to why he is dedicating himself to exposing the lies and manipulations that got us into Iraq. Be sure to read it; it’s very moving.

Back to the gas: You’ll remember that in the weeks before the Iraq invasion, a hoard of operatives infested talk radio and cable news, babbling about how Saddam “gassed his own people,” meaning the Kurds, which was why we had to invade Iraq right now. A month before the invasion I wrote this piece for Democratic Underground about why the “gassing his own people” talking point fell way short of a casus belli. And in that I linked to this 1993 Los Angeles Times article by Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas about how Bush I secretly continued to build Iraq’s war machine after the gassing of the Kurds. Just nine months before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, President Bush I approved $1 billion in aid to Iraq. The Bush I Administration also provided Iraq with access to sophisticated “dual use” (military and civilian) technology, “despite emerging evidence that they were working on nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction.” Frantz and Waas uncovered

…a long-secret pattern of personal efforts by Bush — both as President and as vice president — to support and placate the Iraqi dictator. Repeatedly, when serious objections to helping Hussein arose within the government, Bush and aides following his directives intervened to suppress the resistance.

The reason for this, ostensibly, was that while Saddam Hussein might have been an odious little toad, he was an enemy of Iran, which after the fall of the Soviet Union had moved into the #1 spot on the Real Bad Places list.

But classified records show that Bush’s efforts on Hussein’s behalf continued well beyond the end of the Iran-Iraq War and persisted in the face of increasingly widespread warnings from inside the American government that the overall policy had become misdirected.

Moreover, it appears that instead of merely keeping Hussein afloat as a counterweight to Iran, the U.S. aid program helped him become a dangerous military power in his own right, able to threaten the very U.S. interests that the program originally was designed to protect.

Clearly, U.S. aid did not lead Hussein to become a force for peace in the volatile region. In the spring of 1990, as senior Administration officials worked to give him more financial aid, the Iraqi leader bragged that Iraq possessed chemical weapons and threatened to “burn half of Israel.” Nor did he change his savagely repressive methods. In the summer of 1988, for example, he shocked the world by killing several thousand Kurds with poison gas.

Even today, the Iraqi nuclear and chemical weapons programs carried forward with the help of sophisticated American technology continue to haunt U.S. and United Nations officials as they struggle to root out elements of those programs that have survived the allied victory in the Persian Gulf War.

I remember when Halabja was gassed, in March 1988. I remember especially the photographs of dead mothers, their arms wrapped protectively around their dead babies. At the time I did not understand what was going on. But I remember there was some movement in the Senate toward doing something about it. Senators Claiborne Pell, Al Gore, and Jesse Helms introduced legislation to impose sanctions on Iraq, and the Senate passed a Prevention of Genocide Act, unanimously, just one day after it was introduced.

But the Reagan White House vetoed the Act [lobbied against the Act so that it died in the House], and squelched any reprisals or sanctions against Saddam, and continued to shovel truckloads of money and technology to Baghdad. And President Bush I continued Reagan’s policies.

This part of the Franz-Waas article caught my attention:

What drove Bush to champion the Iraqi cause so ardently and so long is not clear. But some evidence suggests that it may have been a case of single-minded pursuit of a policy after its original purpose had been overtaken by events — and a failure to understand the true nature of Hussein himself.

Maybe Junior isn’t as different from Poppy as we had thought. Anyway, Saddam’s behavior was erratic and threatening, yet Bush I continued to treat him as if he were America’s Best Bud. I dimly remember hearing that when he invaded Kuwait, Saddam sincerely believed George Bush I wouldn’t mind.

And some of you will remember the glorious episode that occurred after the Persian Gulf War, in which President Bush I encouraged the Kurds to rebel against Saddam Hussein and then stood by while Saddam crushed the rebellion, ruthlessly. I believe some of the mass graves found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion — the ones that didn’t date to the Iran-Iraq War or the Persian Gulf War — held the bodies of Kurdish rebels.

In 2003, before the invasion, I remembered Halabja, and I remembered the crushed Kurdish rebellion. The righties who were fired up to to go war had never heard of these things before; they seemed to think the Kurds were still being gassed, and we had to invade quickly to rescue them. And after the invasion, whenever troops found a mass grave of Kurdish rebels, the righties would dance about and yell See? We told you Saddam was evil. But the mass graves were no surprise. The righties were always oblivious to the rest of the story, and wouldn’t listen, and wouldn’t believe us if they did listen.

But it strikes me now that all of the trouble surrounding Iraq going back 20 years resulted from Republican presidents being soft with a ruthless dictator. Appeasing, even. It’s a damn shame the Dems didn’t push that point through the Noise Machine years ago, because not doing so allowed the next generation of soft little Republican fatasses to portray themselves as hardened he-men warriors, even as they call Democrats “weak” and swift-boat any real warriors who dare oppose them.

Swift Boating Murtha

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Over the past few days several bloggers, including Taylor Marsh and Bob Geiger, have discussed the recent swift-boat campaign against John Murtha.

Last week Sean-Paul Kelley of the Agonist reported that Murtha’s Republican opponent in the November elections, Diane Irey, has teamed up with some of the old “swift boat” crew to smear Jack Murtha. One of crewpersons, an operative named Amanda Doss, set up a web site called Murthalied.com from which to spread smears. Kelley included Doss’s email address in his post.

Now Raw Story reports that Doss’s site went “live” early so that she could post some of the hateful email she received. Apparently she thought she was proving a point.

Well, says Taylor Marsh, they can post emails, and we can post emails. Taylor’s collection of fan mail from righties makes the notes Doss posted seem almost affectionate.

And I nominate this little beauty for the nasty prize.

However, I would like to gently suggest that one does not have to send abusive emails to people one does not like. And it is possible to express disagreement without calling the person with whom you disagree a bleeping bleeping bleep. I know I’m bucking conventional wisdom here, but I still think I’m right.

Memo to Donkey Cons

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… bloggers who lack the guts to permit comments: They let me in for free, and I got there by mass transit. Still jealous?

Update: Oooo, now the poor babies are whining that they can’t leave up comments threads because lefties are mean to them. And then they launch into a diatribe that somehow blames liberals for every atrocity visited upon mankind since the invention of socks, including the French Terror, 100 million people slaughtered by Communist regimes (they link to a book about it, in case I didn’t know), ax murders, nasty things allegedly done by the Black Panthers, and the demise of Kathleen Willey’s cat.

Righties are such weenies. As I said in the next post, they dish it out a whole lot better than they can take it.

(Anyway, boobies, I already said didn’t pay to get into the Drum Major Institute party. They let me in for free because I was on the blogger host committee.)

Well, since the Donkey Cons blog doesn’t permit comments, you are welcome to leave comments to their post here.

Update update: The children are utterly unglued and raving that they will outkeyboard me. Well, go ahead and keyboard, dears. I find them amusing, but not enough to waste much time on. Especially since they don’t seem to have enough traffic to generate more than a handful of hits. I ‘spect they’re getting some traffic from here, though.

Lacking the moral fiber to admit the exchange began because they called me a “limousine liberal” — which is a knee-slapper to anyone who knows me — now they’re pretending we’re having a disagreement about Kos. The Donkey Cons and other rightie blogs are having a high old time joining the press pile-on of Kos, which they’ve dubbed Kosola, in the assumption that Kos is guilty of influence peddling or something. Once again, they resemble nothing more than a pack of brainless hyenas smelling some dead they can eat.

Now, I have no idea what Kos is peddling to the pols, but the truth is that on the blogosphere he doesn’t have all that much influence to peddle. Some of the charges I’ve heard — that he controls which blogs get advertising from the Advertising Liberally network, for example — are known personally to me to be bogus. And in the larger liberal blogosphere, a Kos endorsement plus a $1 bill will get you whatever you want on the McDonald’s dollar menu. People support candidates when they think the candidates are worthy of support, and if they don’t, they don’t. I’m not seeing a Warner bandwagon, for example.

I don’t know what’s up with Jerome Armstrong and the SEC charges, but the scandal du jour is that Jerome used to be a serious student of astrology. To which I say, so?

Other than general disparagement of blogs and blog readers by people like the Keyboarding Cabbage (which righties are too stupid to realize applies to them, too), the only part of the pile-on that really irritates me is that people like Glenn Greenwald and Steve Gilliard have had to spend time exposing, um, lapses of fact in the stuff the professionals are writing about Kos. A waste, I say; that much brainpower can be put to better use.

Smoke-Filled Backrooms of the Internets, Conclusion

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If you want an instrument to measure how imperfectly the “MSM” reflects actual reality, look no further than the current media pile-on of Markos Moulitsas. Today David Brooks jumps in.

They say that the great leaders are gone and politics has become the realm of the small-minded. But in the land of the Lilliputians, the Keyboard Kingpin must be accorded full respect.

The Keyboard Kingpin, a k a Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way. And in this way the Kingpin has made himself a mighty force in his own mind, and every knee shall bow.

Oh yes, the Mighty Kos, who last Thursday was seen sitting quietly in the corner of the Lotus lounge while a roomful of rabid lambs debated the lamb business. “It’s not about me,” he responded, wistfully, to a question — I didn’t hear the question — and this lamb concurs. While I appreciate Kos’s skill at connecting blogging to the fleshly political world, I don’t actually read Kos all that much. No offense, Kos, but I don’t. On my list of blogs I try to read frequently Daily Kos comes in at about #20, meaning I don’t get to it more than once or twice a week.

Nor are Kos’s ideas accepted unquestioningly among bloggers. For example, among the many bloggers I’ve schmoozed with over the past month, including those at YearlyKos, I can testify there is considerable disinterest in a Mark Warner presidential bid in 2008. This is true even among those of us who went to the infamous Warner party in Las Vegas. And I can’t imagine any leftie blogger endorsing Warner just on Kos’s say so. That’s not how we do things here. As the Green Knight says,

First of all, Kos doesn’t have any followers. He has readers and co-bloggers, sure. But followers? Don’t be ridiculous. We’re talking about progressives, liberals, and Democrats here. You might as well try to herd cats as make people like us get in line.

The cluelessness of MSM pundits is one of the many public outrages that inspired a lot of us to get into blogging; blogging is, at least, more therapeutic than yelling at the TV. Watching and reading some of these bubble-wrapped wonders can be more frustrating than, well, herding cats. But now we have hard proof that their almighty opinions have all the substance of soufflé.

“Keyboard kingpin?” Puh-LEEZE.

It’s clear that elements among the punditocracy have been incited to take down these blogger people before they get too big for their britches. As Greg at The Talent Show says, “I’d love to get a peek at what’s been getting discussed on their private email list.”

However — and I’m speculating here — I wonder if the real target is Mark Warner and not Kos. After YearlyKos I thought it weird when the Warner party became the subject of much finger wagging, even though other politicians hosted parties for conference attendees. Wes Clark invited us all to a “do” at the Hard Rock Cafe, for example (I passed; I was too tired to go), and two or three congressional candidates held more modest cocktail parties. Yet Mark Warner’s party has been called out as if there were something sinister about a candidate inviting voters to some kind of shindig so he can shake their hands and kiss their babies. Not that I saw any babies at the Warner party, but I trust you get the point.

Where did the finger-wagging campaign originate? Why is the MSM suddenly piling on Kos this week? Is attacking Kos a back-door way of derailing candidates associated with Kos? Like Mark Warner? Or Sherrod Brown? Or Ned Lamont? Who is orchestrating this?

Today Newsweek is running a photo of Kos and Warner together on its web site; I assume the photo is in the print edition as well. And Newsweek reports on the 2004 Howard Dean internet campaign and the current challenge of Joe Lieberman as if these efforts were entirely Kos’s doing instead of the work of many blogs pulling together. As I said in an earlier post, Kos has become the physical manifestation of the blogosphere to people who don’t get blogging. Someone should explain to them that he’s only the tip of a very big iceberg.

In the two previous posts I’ve talked about the allegations of quid pro quo, some of which are absurd on their little red faces, and of the mysterious email that was allegedly written by Steve Gilliard, even though Steve says he has no record of writing it, and sent to the Townhall Townhouse listserv, even though no one on the listserv received it. Like the New Republic pundits before him, Brooks holds up the email as evidence of something without questioning its provenance. Way to go.

And these are the pros. These people have editors.

Brooks repeats allegations against Jerome Armstrong that in 2000 he was paid to tout a software stock on the web. The SEC is investigating this. I don’t claim to know what happened. But Brooks passes on the New Republic claim that Kos tried to shush discussion of the SEC story on the web, without noting that TAPPED did write about it. Some “kingpin.”

And Brooks tries to use these allegations to build an implication that Armstrong and Kos are nothing more than old-style influence peddlers. For the other side, which Brooks ignores, see Ezra Klein.

Now, if I were the Democrats, I’d be coming to the support of the blogosphere, because as I say I’m not persuaded Kos and bloggers are the real targets here. And Brooks should be ashamed of himself for passing on smears without bothering to check facts. But then, he’s only a vegetable.

See also Raw Story, James Wolcott, Tbogg, and Shakespeare’s Sister.

Smoke-Filled Backrooms of the Internets, Continued

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The owners of The New Republic must’ve ordered a hit on Markos Moulitsas. Following up the Zengerle v. Kos dispute, another TNR columnist, Lee Siegel, wrote on Thursday defending “Zengerle’s artful and honest exposure of someone who, more and more, seems to represent the purest, most classical strain of hypocrisy.” That’s Kos, I guess. Siegel goes on to fire buckshot at the whole leftie blogosphere —

It’s a bizarre phenomenon, the blogosphere. It radiates democracy’s dream of full participation but practices democracy’s nightmare of populist crudity, character-assassination, and emotional stupefaction. It’s hard fascism with a Microsoft face. It puts some people, like me, in the equally bizarre position of wanting desperately for Joe Lieberman to lose the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont so that true liberal values might, maybe, possibly prevail, yet at the same time wanting Lamont, the hero of the blogosphere, to lose so that the fascistic forces ranged against Lieberman might be defeated. (Every critical event in democracy is symbolic of the problem with democracy.)

So if people use the internets to organize a political challenge to Lieberman, that makes us “fascistic forces”? Why doesn’t that make us “participants in representative democracy”?

And yes, the blogosphere gets a little rough, but I say most of us are genteel compared to rightie talk radio.

Siegel must’ve caught some attitude for the Thursday column, because yesterday he posted on “The Origins of Bloggofascism.”

“Moron”; “Wanker” (a favorite blogofascist insult, maybe because of the similarity between the most strident blogging and masturbating); and “Asshole” have been the three most common polemical gambits. A reactor even had the gall to refer to me as a “conservative.” Another resourceful adversarialist invited me to lick his scrotum. Please send a picture and a short essay describing your favorite hobbies. One madly ambitious blogger, who has been alternately trying to provoke and fawning over TNR writers in an attempt to break down the door–I’m too polite to mention any names–even asked who it was at TNR who gave me “the keys to a blog.”

Poor baby.

For the record, in the past I’ve blogged about digital lynch mobs and why people should learn to express disagreement without suggesting the person disagreed with should go bleep his mother. This is for the disagree-er’s own sake as well as for the sake of the disagree-ee. As I wrote here,

Anger is a tricky thing. It can motivate people, but it can also repel. I wrote last week, for example, that antiwar protests are more effective when protesters are serious but not angry. That’s because people who are not angry at the same things you are will be uncomfortable with your anger. If you want to persuade people to see your point of view, it helps to do it in a not-angry way.

However,

Blogging, on the other hand, is not about persuasion as much as it is about peeling away layers of socially conditioned bullshit to get at bare-bones truth. A good blogger is an honest blogger. I’d say to any blogger that if you’re angry, dig into yourself to find the source of your anger and blog it. Don’t worry about what the neighbors will think.

Saturday I quoted Sam Keen;

    Honor your anger. But before you express it, sort out the righteous from the unrighteous. Immediately after a storm, the water is muddy; rage is indiscriminate. It takes time to discriminate, for the mud to settle. But once the stream runs clear, express your outrage against any who have violated your being. Give the person you intend to love the gift of discriminating anger.

Poor Seigel got blasted with some indiscriminate rage, which is unpleasant, but it’s hardly fascism. Juvenile, probably. Pissed off, definitely. But pissed off doesn’t add up to fascism.

Seigel complains about “abusive attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism” — i.e., somebody called him a “wanker.” And calling him a wanker is fascism, he says, because his dictionary defines fascism as “any tendency toward or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control.” I’m not sure how being called a “wanker” reduces a person to severe autocratic or dictatorial control, but I’ll let that pass.

Seigel’s definition of fascism is a poor definition. Per David Neiwert,

In today’s context, Nazism specifically and fascism generally are most often cited by partisans of both sides not with any reference to its actual content but merely as the essence of totalitarian evil itself. This is knee-jerk half-thought. Obviously, I don’t agree that the mere reference to fascism, let alone a serious discussion of it, automatically renders a point moot. But a reflexive, ill-informed or inappropriate reference — which describes the bulk of them — should suffice to invalidate any argument.

Gotcha, Siegel.

Then, after further whining about the “intolerance and rage” in the blogosphere, Siegel continues to express intolerance and rage against Kos and the blogosphere.

“Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents,” he says, and then he pulls a quote from Kos out of a San Francisco Chronicle article that begins —

“I believe in government. I was in El Salvador in the late ’70s during the civil war and I saw government as a life-and-death situation,” he said. “There was no one to root for. The government was a corrupt plutocracy and the rebels were Maoists. The concept of government is important.”

Kos said he saw bullets flying and soldiers executing guerrillas, and his father told him all this violence was “politics.” Which, Siegel says, proves that Kos hates politics. But the quote says nothing of the sort; Siegel performed some cognitive acrobatics worthy of Cirque du Soleil to pull “Kos hates politics” out of the Chronicle article. And having observed Kos in a political habitat, I can testify he appeared to be having a good time.

Seigel, increasingly unhinged, drew more illogical inferences from the Chronicle quote:

So he loves government, but hates politics. There’s something chilling about that. I wonder, does Zuniga consider the Solidarity movement disgusting, compromising, venal politics, too? And was there really no one to root for during the Salvadoran civil war? It’s hard to believe the usually inflexibly partisan Zuniga actually said that. The rebels may have been “Maoist”–whatever that meant to them in Central America at the time–but their goal of overthrowing a brutal, rapacious regime might well be something that a passionate political idealist and reformer like Zuniga, looking back at it in 2004, would sympathize with. Or so you would think.

Lordy, Siegel, Kos was a little kid in the 1970s, and he was just explaining why government (as opposed to instability and anarchy) is important to him. Out of this Siegel constructs a straw Kos-ideology and calls it “chilling.” But seems to me that most Americans would agree that a choice between Maoist guerrillas and brutal, rapacious plutocrats leaves one with “no one to root for.” In the real world, often there really is no one to root for other than the innocents who get in the way of other people’s agendas. Think Iraq.

Siegel continues,

But, then, Zuniga–let’s cut the puerile nicknames of “DailyKos, “Atrios,” “Instapundit” et al., which are one part fantasy of nom de guerres, one part babytalk, and a third thuggish anonymity–believes so deafeningly and inflexibly that it’s hard to tell what he believes at all, expecially if you try to make out his conviction over the noisy bleating of his followers.

In other words, Siegel is so enraged that he is reduced to calling us bloggers “morons,” “wankers,” and “assholes,” albeit with a fancier vocabulary. At least he isn’t calling us “conservatives.”

Kos is catching heat now because he has become the physical manifestation of blogging to people who don’t “get” blogging. As I’ve said before, Kos is a great organizer who deserves credit for what he’s achieved in and out of the blogosphere. But I don’t know of any bloggers who think of him as a “our leader.” Those of us with our own blogs (which is most of the leftie blogosphere) are our own bloggers. We don’t look to Kos to tell us what to think, and we don’t always agree with him. DailyKos is a high-traffic site because it’s a huge community with a wealth of good bloggers and diarists and constantly changing content, not because we all click in to receive the wisdom of Kos.

Just wait til Siegel and the rest of the New Republic wankers figure out that they’re not fighting a cult of Kos. They’re fighting a movement of independent thinkers who now have the means to speak out. The wankers can’t control the message any more.

Poor babies.

Smoke-Filled Backrooms of the Internets

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Thursday night I attended the gala awards party sponsored by the Drum Major Institute honoring Wynton Marsalis, Anna Burger, and Markos Moulitsas.

I had a very good time. But I wasn’t aware until today how close I came to being sucked into a vortex of intrigue and controversy and smoke-filled rooming. And possibly money, although money has a way of fleeing the room whenever I show up, so the money thing is a long shot.

Anyway, I got to the party, held at a nightclub called Lotus on Manhattan’s west side, a bit late. The room was too tightly packed with bodies to mingle much, but I managed to wriggle my way to the bar and claimed a spot next to Steve Gilliard and his blogging partner, the lovely Jen, a.k.a. Jenonymous. So I not only could order drinks but was lucky enough to snag a couple of steak cubes as a tray floated by, which in that room was a major coup.

I couldn’t see the honorees as they were introduced and spoke to the room. But I could hear the remarks. But then I got caught up in talking to another gentleman sitting at the bar who turned out to be a frequent commenter on Unclaimed Territory. Small world. So I wasn’t listening to the remarks all that closely and don’t remember what anybody said. I’m sure it was all very stirring, though.

When the awards part of the evening had concluded, Elana Levin of DMI rounded up us bloggers and took us to a downstairs lounge where we could talk about blog stuff. This was truly a star-studded group, as bloggers go. Along with Steve and Jen were two of the Great Babes of Blogging, Liza Sabater and Lindsay Beyerstein (Lindsay did listen to the remarks and blogged about them, here). Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, another survivor of Conference-a-thon, seemed to have recovered from the ordeal, or else he was faking it very well. Soon Lance Mannion and Blue Girl strolled in. Also Tom Watson and several other bloggers — I have not recovered from Conference-a-thon and cannot be responsible for remembering anything clearly — were there was well. And, oh yes, Kos arrived and took a spot in the corner.

Listen, folks, this is as much celebrity gossip as you’ll ever be likely to find on The Mahablog. Enjoy it.

So we had a lively talk about blog stuff, mostly on the grand themes of what we’re all about and whether we’re really reaching anyone other than “the choir.” We let Kos get a word in here and there, but on the whole he seemed perfectly happy to just hang out and listen. Then Kos left and the crowd thinned, and we were left with a small group that included Steve, Liza, Lindsay, Bob, Elana, and some other folks, and we became determined to find something to eat. So we tumbled out of Lotus and into the West Village street. After some fruitless wandering Steve decided to take charge and lead us to a place that would reliably supply us with hamburgers. He cruised straight and purposefully through waves of strolling people like a ship under sail, with the rest of us paddling frantically in his wake, to the place of hamburgers, and they were good hamburgers. And then I realized it was close to midnight and I had to get back to Grand Central before the Metro North Railroad turned into a pumpkin.

This all seemed fairly innocent to me, but what do I know? I’m still just a small-town Ozark Mountain girl. There’s times all these big city doin’s make me feel like I jes’ left Dogpatch.

According to Jason Zengerle of the floundering New Republic, that basement lounge was in fact a smoke-filled room, albeit a no-smoking one, and I had been sitting in the midst of a conspiracy so immense it would have astonished Whittaker Chambers.

As explained by Glenn Greenwald,

Over the last few days, Jason Zengerle of The New Republic has been engaged in a bizarre crusade to depict “liberal bloggers” as a bunch of mindless, obedient zombies who take orders about what to write from Markos Moulitsas, all in order to ensure that they can continue to enjoy the great financial wealth lavished upon them by virtue of their participation in the “Advertise Liberally” network, which Markos founded but does not operate. To prove this “point,” Zengerle published what he purported to be various e-mails regarding recent accusations against Jerome Armstrong, which Zengerle claimed were sent to the “Townhouse” Google group — comprised of 300 or so journalists, political operatives, bloggers, advocacy organizations, and others designed to facilitate communication between these usually isolated groups. To the extent the “substance” of Zengerle’s accusations are worth responding to, Ezra Klein and Max Sawicky (among many) have done so quite thoroughly, respectively here and here.

I’ll let you sort out the allegations and the refutations of the allegations. But as a participant in the Advertising Liberally network, I want to assure you that the amount of revenue received is not enough to buy my loyalty. A fair amount of hamburgers, yes, but not loyalty. I’m holding out for bigger bucks on the loyalty thing. And Kos and Jerome do not run the Advertising Liberally network; Chris Bowers does. I got in because Chris invited me to join, and I didn’t have to do nothin’ for it. Believe me that any club inviting me to join is not all that exclusive, although there are specific criteria. (Also see Chris on “Who Owns the New Republic?“)

Anyway, Zengerle claims that one of the sources of his allegations was an email from Steve Gilliard. But did Steve write the email? Steve says he has no record of it.

I told Zengerle the same thing and that he needs to provide the provenance of the e-mail so I can confirm or deny it. If it turns out I didn’t write those words, I’m going to write Franklin Foer, the editor of the New Republic and demand a retraction and an apology.

I write thousands of words a day between e-mails, IM, posts and comments. It is easy to lose a phrase or e-mail in that, which I why I can’t call it a fabrication. It may be taken from another e-mail, or a post, but I cannot find those words in my mailbox.

See what I mean about controversy and intrigue? And yet not much was said about any of this Thursday night. “Zengerle is an ass and TNR sucks” pretty much sums up the consensus.

While I’m on the subject of Thursday night I want to say something about the Drum Major Institute. DMI is a progressive think tank dedicated to “defending the American dream.” They’re doing some good work, and I hope to hear more from them in the future.