After citing several of us (to which I shall return), he makes the following analysis of the current situation:
Even now, Chait dislikes the rah-rah team spirit of the blogging left and its rage at writers who do not accept movement discipline. Chait, though a fierce pugilist, is also a civilized writer. The stupid obscenities, the casual abusiveness, and the sinister underlying obsession with AIPAC, Israel, and "neocons" that pervade the left blogosphere must set his teeth on edge. Plus, he can count. Even today, with all the troubles besetting the Bush administration, still twice as many Americans describe themselves as "conservatives" as describe themselves as "liberals." Running hard to the left remains a formula for suicide for any national Democratic candidate.
Yet despite all this - despite all this - Chait and his editors have presented an 8,000 word tribute to the usefulness, value, and ultimate hopefulness (from their point of view) of a phenomenon that 4 years ago they would have regarded as utterly pernicious. That's quite a concession, and the New Republic is quite a place to run it.
Despite all Chait's many and well-founded criticisms of the blogging left - despite all his magazine's no doubt abiding unhappiness with the blogging left's uglier aspects - the piece represents a peace offering from the Lieberman wing of the Democratic party to the Lamont wing. More than a peace offering: a raising of the white flag.
If "even the New Republic" finds more to praise than to blame in the left blogosphere, then the brakes are truly off the Democratic machine. For the first time since 1972, the party left will be allowed to drive the jalopey as far and as fast as it wishes to go.(emphasis added)
First of all, Frum has not read Chait's piece carefully if he believes as he writes here that Chait's damning with faint praise is somehow "waving the white flag". Chait's accusation of intellectual dishonesty, of partisan myopia, and his refusal to understand the reason for our anger at the pernicious influence of "the Lieberman wing" of the Democratic Party (in Frum's infelicitous phrase) are not the result of some grand lefty conspiracy, but out of frustration at the many years of sly dishonesty, out-and-out fantasy-mongering, and disastrous results of listening to people whose judgment has proved, again and again, to be flawed.
Two further points in the highlighted section of Frum's analysis need to be made. First, and again I must stress I can only speak for myself, I do not have any particular animus toward AIPAC. I honestly feel that there are elements of the left that view it as sinister; me, I just view it as an extremely powerful lobby, no more, no less. Does its influence skew domestic debate on Israel? I do not know for sure. I do know that the range of debate that seems acceptable in mainstream organs of the press is much narrower than in Israel itself, as any serious discussion of the flaws of Israeli politics bring out the howls of "anti-Semitism". Having said all that, I do not think we should lay this all at the feet of AIPAC. There are many reasons for our own lack of serious debate on Israel, and our continued support for its disastrous approach to Palestine.
Second, what Frum calls "all the troubles besetting the Bush Administration" (such a nice way of putting it, no?) are not some kind of weird anomaly that arise out of thin air, but the direct result of the way Bush and his pals have run the country for the past six years. His current poll ratings, as atrios, for one, highlights, are at 28% approval. It is constantly amazing to me that Bush apologists do not see the obvious in this, instead spinning all sorts of yarns about how Bush is on the verge of a rebound (Broder), or Democrats should fear taking on Bush (Leon Panetta). Every time the Democrats in Congress challenge the Bush Administration, their poll numbers rise. Every time Bush challenges the Democrats in Congress, his poll numbers fall. This formula, consistent since the opening of the 110th Congress, should tell us more about who actually holds the whip hand. Alas, as the conventional wisdom for a generation has been that Democrats are weak, cowardly, and outside the American mainstream, it is difficult to see what should be obvious to all - not only is Bush down, he is, for all intents and purposes, out. I do not know where Frum finds the information he claims shows that more Americans call themselves conservative than liberal, and as he provides no link, it is difficult to verify, so I will just let it stand as an irrelevancy in the larger context of our current political situation.
Finally, I have to say that Frum does not quote me completely, and by so doing misses a point I was trying to make. First is the quote Frum pulled out of my post:
* Chait, Klein, Broder, Friedman - the whole lot of those who sniff disapprovingly at those of us who are righteously and rightfully enraged by our current empty-headed public discourse - don't get it
Below is the full sentence, from this post:
Chait, Klein, Broder, Friedman - the whole lot of those who sniff disapprovingly at those of us who are righteously and rightfully enraged by our current empty-headed public discourse - don't get it because at some basic level, they don't believe that politics is about anything else than winning an election or an argument.(emphasis added to show what was left out)
By leaving out the part of the sentence highlighted, Frum takes a portion of an argument on the intellectual dishonesty of mainstream critics of blogs and turns it into a snide ad hominem attack on mainstream journalists. In so doing, he manages to change the whole tenor of my words, misrepresenting them, and by implication, my entire criticism of Chait's piece. In so doing, he of course proves part of my point, stressed repeatedly in my own post, that the right is consistently intellectually dishonest.
Again, I am honored to be included in a list with such luminaries of lefty blogs as digby and MyDD, but I am not surprised that Frum not only misrepresents me (and, by implication them), but seems hung up on "obscenity" (apparently, Frum is still in grade school and can't handle four-letter words) and wants us all to believe that the Democrats should fear a President whose approval ratings are hovering, and have been so hovering for close to a year now, at near-Nixonian levels, the result of a combination of official incompetence and near-ubiquitous corruption. Rather than deal with this reality, a reality lefty bloggers not only highlight, but push as the context in which we demand greater courage and action on the part of Democrats, Frum wants us to believe that we need a white flag from "the Lieberman wing" of the Democratic Party in order to move forward. Sorry. We have enough going for us already.
