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It's like watching a demented tennis game.

By Moe Lane Posted in Blogosphere — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

While we've been busy playing Rollerball* over the immigration thing, folks over on the Left have been engaging in their own version of stomp-the-interloper. And thank God for that, for reasons that I'll get into in a bit.

We start with a fellow by the name of Mudcat Saunders - for those of you needing to get up to speed, go here for background - who has come over to Time's blog Swampland to play. And he came out swinging:

I am certain I will get personally attacked for this next statement, but in all honesty, I don't care what the "Metropolitan Wing" of my party thinks. I don't like them. The damage the pseudo-intellectuals have done to my party by abandoning tolerance, combined with their erroneous stereotyping of my people and culture, is something that brings out my incivility. In his column, Joe said, "...the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere." Amen. I must add that this same intellectual arrogance and intolerance overtook the party years ago, and for that very reason, my people in rural America left the tent.

So to those bloggers who believe in a straight-forward dialogue and exchange of ideas, God bless you and thank you. Together, you're coming up with a lot of good stuff, and frankly, much of it has been helpful to me. At the same time, those Democratic bloggers, who have appointed themselves as intellectually superior and believe the only way to win an argument is to shot the loudest with personal attacks, you can go to Hell. Intellectually superior? The truth is these people remind me of the guy who told so many people he had a horse that he finally went and bought a saddle. The "incivility" in their tones tell me they would be much more happy following "pro rasslin" than the political blogs.

What? How do you think that they reacted?

Read on.

In my somewhat professional opinion, it all really started when Mudcat responded to the response in comments (by Paul Lukasiak) to his piece. Mudcat got called a Confederate flag-waving racist, and responded with another post, in which he more or less said that no, he wasn't, and that Paul Lukiasiak was a bit of a twerp.

From my experience, that latter statement is in fact true, but it's overshadowed by the fact that Paul Lukiasiak is also part of the tribe. The left-wing blogosphere is intensely sensitive towards insults done their members by the rest of the Left; more so, in fact, than they are towards insults from the Right**. So when one of their own is criticized, well, time for the responses.

First up was Chris Bowers of MyDD, with his ritual denunciation of Mudcat as a 'concern troll'. This is one of those interesting terms of art; it has some of the same connotations of the VRWC term 'moby', bur the focus is different. Where a moby is a liberal pretending to be a conservative saying deliberately offensive things to make conservatives look bad, a concern troll would be a conservative pretending to be a liberal trying to sow doubt in the appropriateness of a given liberal response. The wrinkle is that, while it is usually very easy to tell a moby from a genuine conservative bigot, it is harder to tell a concern troll from someone who is genuinely concerned. But that is a digression: the point is, Mudcat was declared anathema.

And so it continued, at varying levels of objection and complaint, not to mention the noting of Mudcat's affiliation with the Edwards campaign. After a response or two of increasingly weaker posts, Mudcat finally gives up and apologized to the netroots. I suspect that the remainder of his posts will merely accelerate the whipped-dog trend that we're already seeing.

Two things to take away from this. First off, of course, is that none of the above bloggers dared even note that Mudcat Saunders was called a racist. They won't, either. To do that would be to call into question whether a member of the Tribe engaged in appropriate behavior towards someone who was not... and that is not something that may be called into question. Ever***.

Second: WHEW! Mudcat's precisely the sort of mean-spirited ornery SOB who'll push for something beyond all reasonable expectations - and, unlike his current boss, he actually knows something about how the South operates. He couldn't have turned Edwards into an actual populist, but he might have been able to give the campaign some actually useful pointers in how to operate in the region. That institutional knowledge would have come in handy when the Edwards people were absorbed by the eventual Democratic nominee's campaign.

But now that the netroots have cut off his testicles, that won't happen. He may even get fired. Thank you, netroots!

Moe

*The proper version; which is to say, not the remake.

**We're expected to despise them (actually, we're expected to fear them, which is one reason why we annoy them so), after all.

***The Brittany Gilbert case, come to think of it, demonstrates this fact nicely. Brittany was a local niche blogger (I use the term without heat; she was apparently very, very good at it), while Jesus General is a solid member of the Tribe and Steven Gilliard has been sanctified. Of course the Left defaulted to taking JG's side. Not really patriarchal, though. It was more a power imbalance thing than anything else: on the Left 'sphere, the strong take and the weak submit.

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