To pretense...

From August J. Pollak's Overboard Blog

The Kos thing

I really don't even understand why some high-tier bloggers are even bothering to continue this discussion. It amazes me that once a suggestion has been thrown out by the Right- "say, didn't John Kerry molest a retarded baby in Vietnam?"- that anyone on the Left actually thinks that it will be eliminated from discourse.

We seem to have some fascination with the economy of the blogosphere all of a sudden... let's talk about the psychology of the blogosphere for a minute, okay? Bloggers don't care. They just don't. They don't care if anything they say is one hundred percent pure bullshit. If they can feel good about themselves and extract one more day of joy out of their meaningless non-blog lives by snarking in someone's comments section, they will.

The accusations about Kos being a Armstrong Williams-esque shill for Howard Dean are bullshit. Everyone knows it. Why are we even bothering trying to legitimately counter it? It's bullshit, we all know it's bullshit, the right-wingers all know it's bullshit. But they know the "Al Gore invented the internet" line is bullshit too, and you still see it in weblog comments.

Oliver Willis or Jesse Taylor could write 2,000 of the most eloquent, intelligent words on the dangers of the current Middle East crisis. Within the first five comments, some dipshit loser will simply respond "oh, I suppose you'd rather have the army run by a guy who raped a retard in 'Nam, wouldn't you?" They don't care. They don't care about their own self-evaluations. What matters- the only thing that matters- is that they said something they think was really clever on the comments section of some person they've likely never met.

In the three years I've been blogging I've seen college professors knowingly lie. I've seen gay men sell out their very soul for the sake of pretending that their President doesn't consider them an abomination. I've seen brilliant women with the most clever minds for pop culture force themselves to act stupid for the sake of convincing themselves of the infallibility of recent foreign policy. The right-wing blogosphere has removed itself from any realm of rational discourse and instead established only one principle: win the argument. It doesn't even matter to them what the fucking argument is. If some liberal said something, they're either a hypocrite, a liar, or a traitor. Don't worry, you'll make some shit up to validate that a little later.

The Daily Show has proven this: we've entered an age of satire. There is no other correct response. It's why I'm a cartoonist; because when these people from the WSJ and the American Spectator walk up and say "Markos Moulistas was a paid shill for the Dean campaign!" you just have to laugh.

Kos- it doesn't matter. Someone's made this comment about you. Two years from now, someone will make some kind of swipe about Kos and being paid by Howard Dean. There's nothing that's going to stop the right-wingers from doing it. It's their new code. Their new plaything. Their new copy-and-paste clever snark to make themselves feel like they "really got you there" instead of actually having a point. You've already proven it's bullshit. There's nothing more to do.

So just laugh at them. Because both you and they know it's bullshit. And when you laugh at them, and keep laughing, they realize their attempt to snark your comments section didn't work.

Update: In response to Atrios, I agree with what he said. I just want to clarify that by "not bothering" I don't mean we shouldn't fight back. Hell, I wouldn't be working where I am now if I didn't believe in fighting back.

My point is that this conversation has been declared irrelevant by the right-wing bloggers. It's part of their ammo now, and there's little that can be done about it by means of factual rebuttal. They don't care. No one proved that the Killian memos were forgeries, only that their accuracy wasn't verified. It doesn't matter- the Right will, until the end of time, say that they "proved CBS aired fake memos." They'll say until the end of time that Bill Clinton was a rapist, that Al Gore said he invented the internet, and that Richard Gere shoved a live gerbil up his anus.

I think there are way too many times when we actually bother to entertain these attempts from warbloggers to feel much more important about what they're doing than they actually are. I think shows like Crossfire would have survived- and thrived- if people on the left just responded to Bob Novak by saying "are you fucking kidding me?" and staring his bullshit down with supressed laughter until he ran off the stage crying. Conservatives try to implicate the left for "lowering the discourse." They're not worried about us lowering- or raising- the discourse. They're worried that we might get a clue and stop engaging them in discourse.

We've raised Ann Coulter to new heights by trying to counter her. She doesn't care. Michael Moore is delegitimized by the Right by means of sarcasm and humor. Dean was destroyed by jokes about the scream. If Crossfire opened every show with "and look what that crazy bitch said today," followed by a shot of Paul and James laughing their asses off, Ann Coulter would be the leggiest assistant corporate attorney in Accounts Recieving right now.

The right-wing bloggers don't want to hear our rebuttals. The President doesn't want to hear the Democrats' counter-proposals. History will never look back on this time and discuss how changes were made through the art of rational bipartisan discussion. But I'm damn sure history has a chance to look back on this era... and laugh.

Second update: fixed earlier spelling errors.
Posted by August J. Pollak at 12:45 AM