The conservative end of the blogosphere has always outshone its opposite counterpart with respect to flamboyance of sentiment. It's true that you can go check out Daily Kos on most any given day and find a few recommended posts of dubious logical worth - user diaries too often fall under the general categories of Stories About People The Diarist Knows Who Have Lost Their Jobs or Rambling Demands For the Public Option, and of these, way too damned many end with angry/triumphant/offended rhetorical flourishes expressed in bold and all caps. But as an entity, Daily Kos works - hundreds of regular contributors continue to do an incalculable amount of exposing, advocating, fundraising, muckraking, organizing, and all those other things that a political movement needs done, and the vast majority of the official content in particular is reasonably expressed and thoroughly sourced.
The conservative equivalent of Daily Kos would be RedState.com, which has far fewer users but nonetheless makes up for its logistical shortfalls by way of an absolutely mind-blowing failure of collective self-awareness. For instance,
this user diary was posted last week to general acclaim and endless upvoting:
Earlier this evening, as most of you now know, one of our own, Rush Hudson Limbaugh, while taking withering fire, crashed and burned.
Tonight, Rush is no longer just a radio personality.
Tonight, Rush is no longer just a NFL owner denied
Tonight, Rush is us. And we are him.Tonight Rush became the metaphor for all of us
every man woman and child in this great nation of ours.
And it just goes on like that for a while. The short version, edited by your correspondent for taste as well as length, goes like this:
We all have our dreams in life
such as they might be. Rush dreamed of being an owner in the NFL... Will your light of your dreams be next?
Like all terrible things, the piece ends with that ubiquitous old poem, "First they came for the communists..." And it launches right into that contextually awkward first line without a hint of irony or even the sense that such a thing as irony can exist.
The state of the conservative commentariat in general and its blogger division in particular is even worse than it appears to the casual observer. Mirroring the brain drain of the past several years whereby the men of intelligence have left the GOP for smarter pastures, many of the conservative blogosphere's more capable writers have abandoned their former allies in disgust. The most dramatic of these departures has been that of Charles Johnson, once widely revered among conservatives for leading the way on such things as Rathergate, co-founding Pajamas Media, and otherwise advancing the cause of citizen journalism. Johnson's success in uncovering the truth made him a hero to many on the right; the problem is that, over the last couple of years, Johnson has opted to uncover the truth regarding certain other things that many of those same people would prefer be left alone - for instance, that former Washington Times editor Robert Stacy McCain, who co-wrote Donkey Cons with the woman who in turn wrote Palin's recent biography and who has otherwise found great success as an allegedly respectable pundit - has expressed a variety of white supremacist sentiments in comments and articles written under a Confederate-inspired pen name.
Even as we discover more and more evidence of his racial preferences, McCain and his various backers continue to ignore it. McCain himself has taken mostly to composing deranged insults
directed at myself,
Charles Johnson, and occasionally
both myself and Charles Johnson at the same time; over the weekend he
finally managed to address one of the numerous charges I've leveled at him over the past month or so, but did so without actually linking to my piece lest his readers learn too much. But there is only so much he can do in his own defense; one cannot write for white supremacist outlets under an assumed name or associate with violent neo-Nazi leaders under his real one, as McCain has, and still try to carry on as usual when such facts are revealed and disseminated. One is entitled to his views, and one is even entitled to conceal them, but one is not entitled to conceal them successfully for any length of time. The internet is serious business.
Still, all is not lost for McCain. It might be a difficult trick to come out of the closet as a white supremacist, but if he were to go about it skillfully, he could perhaps reestablish himself as a sort of mainstream voice on behalf of our nation's various Confederate revivalists, neo-Nazi layabouts, and other assorted toy fascist crackerjacks. There's probably some money in it, anyway.