Dan Rather and MyDD

Well, according to Killian's secretary, the memos that have aroused so much controversy were apparently not written by him (through her), but roughly correspond with other memos that probably did exist in Killian's "Cover His Ass" file.

I had attempted to write another piece about my take on this whole situation, but hadn't figured out how to approach it, until I read this by MyDD:

Over the past few days, southpaws spent a lot of time countering the "forged" charges made by freepers, but you never saw any of our charges showing up in national stories on the subject. Instead, defense of the memos was left entirely to CBS news. Our successes with Trent Lott, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark were remarkable, but of late I feel that the right-wingers are outstripping us in our ability to push a big news story into the national media. The right-wing blogosphere has become integrated into the Mighty Wurlitzer, while we remain a loose confederation of outrage, analysis and action.

This is something I had been worried about for a little while. Throughout much of the year the right-wing bloggers have been pretty aimless and doctrinaire; Glenn Reynolds and Co. have been been harder-and-harder pressed to actually defend Bush's record, and when they have they've been pretty weak at it.

Thing is, that isn't really what the conservative machine has ever been good at. What it's good at is attacking and obfuscating. DD's concerns capture the essential imbalance both online and off: that while liberal arguments and analysis tend to be loosely grouped around various issues and outrages, conservative arguments and analysis are fundamentally about supporting conservativism itself- everything else is secondary.

(Y'know, the whole "movement consciousness" thing that everybody's been aware of for years. )
The defense has been difficult because the subject is indefensible, but attacking the other guy is perfectly doable... so that's what they're doing. Whether that "other guy" is CBS or Kerry, the dictum "the best defense is a good offense" dominates the strategy. This is not to say that the right is monolithic, but that the vaunted "message discipline" is a much more important issue that it's been given credit for.

How to deal with it? Well, quite a bit of the problem is addressed earlier in the post:

-The lower the stickiness of a blog, the higher the relative traffic value of a link from that blog to the blog being linked. In other words, a blog where there isn't much to do besides visit (no comments, few or no special pages, short articles), will cause a higher percentage of its traffic base to visit a blog that it links than will a blog with high stickiness (diaries, long articles, polls, comments, arguments, many special pages, etc).

-High traffic right-wing blogs, such as Andrew Sullivan, Hugh Hewitt, Real Clear Politics, Powerline and especially Instapundit (among the top seven right-wing blogs, only Captain's Quarters and Little Green Footballs have comments), tend to be less sticky than high traffic left wing blogs. Among the top seven left-wing blogs in terms of traffic, Dailykos, Atrios, Political Animal, Wonkette, Smirking Chimp, Political Wire and Talking Points Memo, four of the seven have comments, and Dailykos, twice as trafficked as any other blog according to some measurements, is perhaps the stickiest blog of them all. In fact Dailykos is so sticky, I can tell you right now without equivocation that being linked by in a post by Atrios does a lot more for MyDD's traffic than being linked on a front-page story by Dailykos, despite the enormous traffic gap between the two sites. (The two huge spikes in the link were on days when Atrios linked us,. By contrast, we were linked five times on front page Dailykos articles over the last month, but you can't tell what days those are, can you? Further, as I write this, we are experiencing a third major upsurge in traffic, once again courtesy of Atrios).

-The lower stickiness of top right-wing sites, especially Instapundit, can lead to a complete domination of the right-wing blogosphere by the "one big story" if the top bloggers are all pushing one story. Glenn Reynolds in particular, who does not have comments or special pages and who rarely comments on a subject beyond "xxx has the goods on this one," or "indeed," can send the traffic of any blog he links skyrocketing to a degree no left-wing blog can even come close to matching (and he links other blogs a lot). Right-wing blog traffic, and the articles people tend to read on any individual right-wing blog, has a remarkable correlation to the interests of the top-right wing bloggers, and Glenn Reynolds in particular. That is why, in the title of this article, I called the right-wing blogosphere a top-down operation.

This is a niche that Reynolds owns on the right and that nobody else really does on the left... although Atrios comes close, the incredible popularity and value of his comments threads means that many Atrios readers likely don't click through to the source link, but to the comments links... and like many, many left bloggers, he tends to link to news sources more than other bloggers.

(This doesn't mean that Atrios is doing anything wrong. Far from it. Tt means that Eschaton is objectively a better website than Glenn's, except as a means of reiterating talking points and providing a vehicle for other bloggers. It's just that nobody else does it either.)

To make a long story short, the lower stickiness of top right-wing blogs compared to top left-wing blogs leads to greater message consistency in their half of the political blogosphere than in ours (I can show anyone extensive site meter statistics to prove this). This consistency helps stories from the right-wing blogosphere reach the national media more often than those from the left-wing blogosphere. This seems to mirror the left and the right in other mediums as well.

Again, this partially stems from the varied goals of the two: the left seeks to highlight, explain and analyze (the vast majority of the time), whereas the right seeks to aid "their side" in gaining or maintaining power in a Manachean struggle against their left-liberal "enemies" (the vast majority of the time) .

So, the solution seems pretty simple, actually, although difficult: left-wing bloggers need to link to each other more, and do what they can to ensure that they grab hold of a story and don't let it go. I've fallen into the habit of only reading a few key blogs and their comment sections, which is something I need to change (as well as posting, but as you can see that's improving somewhat)... but the larger goal must be to ensure that the simple bloggers' duty of letting people know what others think about the issues (and keeping them alive) gets done by those with the power to make issues "happen". We may not have talk radio or Fox News to repeat our arguments, but at least the top-tier blogs do get read. That's power, and for all the uselessness of his commentary, Glenn does use that power pretty well.

(And, yes, I'm aware that I'm high-stickiness due to the length of the entries and the presense of a comments thread. In my defense, however, I'll just point out that I hardly have Kos' traffic. It's a catch-22. That's why I said "difficult".)

Edit: An additional thought. While I like commentary threads, I think they may be the key to the problem. When someone reads a blog entry and wishes to respond, they have two options: writing a response in their own blog (starting one if necessary) or writing in the comments thread. (You can do both, but it's pretty rare, and often awkward.) There is some great discussion in the thread for this story, no doubt, but this sort of thing saps the back-and-forth linking and discussion that is the lifeblood of the so-called "blogosphere". if someone comments on their blog, MyDD will write a counter-argument (or someone else), which will be followed by another counter-argument, and another, and another... and while the length of each post may be short, the volume will be much higher, and much harder for casual readers to miss.

Hiding the discussion away in the discussion threads may be tidier and stickier, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether it leads to steadily increasing over-concentration.

Addendum

One other thing: the media perception that Kerry is way behind is actually not a bad thing for him at the moment. Later it would be, because of bandwagoneering, but right now it's Kerry that's being "misunderestimated", just as he was when Dean was leading the pack.

Plus, if Ruy is right, those polls are highly deceptive, implying that the current "Bush lead" has more to do with the problem of identifying "likely voters" than anything substantial. The "come from behind" position married with reasonably good polling numbers?

That's not a bad place to be.

Distractions and the Wurlitzer

Both the blogosphere and the media have been obsessed with the question of whether or not some memos purporting to show Bush shirking duties are forgeries. The claim is that the documents use both justified text and a superscripted "th", which typewriters couldn't handle at the time but modern word processors can. Unfortunately, none of this is true.

I haven't got involved or commented for the same reason that I avoided the equally spurious "Swift Boaters" controversy: both are really silly distractions thrown up by the Bush campaign to try to muddy the waters. The attacks are and were almost ludicrously flawed: one capitalizes on people's ignorance of past typewriter technology; the other on the vast difference between patriotically serving one's country and knee-jerk McCarthyite nationalism.

(Yes, one can be a soldier and yet understand that your leaders messed up in going there and do whatever one can to ensure that others don't go through what you did. Former firemen are allowed to speak out against unnecessary fires; why not former soldiers and unnecessary wars?)

In the end, though, the biggest reason why I have trouble summoned up the energy to pick through all this, well, crap is explained well by the poorman:

Let me save everyone a whole lot of time. They are genuine. How do I know? Because the internet is currently awash in wingnuts claiming the memos are fakes. Ergo, they are for real. Q.E.D.
Some people may feel that I'm just being flip here. Is that so, some people? Tell me: how rich would you be right now if, every time something was posted on a right-wing message board, or everytime Drudge had an exclusive, or any time Rush Limbaugh revealed a secret truth that the liberal media won't tell you, you called up your bookie and put down $20 even money on "bullshit"? The correct answer is: "pretty fucking rich".

For decades, almost every supposed "scandal" hauled out by the right has turned out to be a steaming load--just ask Bill Clinton and his barber-- so why on earth should we pay attention to it now?

Lets be honest. The only reason this river of faeces exists is because Scaife 'n Co. figured out that you can flood the media with appalling lies to get them to believe moderate ones. Say that Kerry sacrifices puppies to Set, and the media will triangulate between that lie and the truth to conclude that he only kicks them for fun. Sure, you'll eventually get discovered, but if the river keeps flowing, they'll be too caught up in the next scandal to care, and the whole thing will wash over any of the real issues that should have been the subject of discussion in the first place.

Of course, this wouldn't be necessary if they could actually claim a coherent and defensible position on said issues, but you know what Khrushchev said: if you don't have either the facts or the law on your side, bang your shoe on the table and make as much noise as you can.

Fortunately, Wurlitzers and typewriters are pretty good at that.

Holy Crap

The Justice department just got caught trying to censor a supreme court decision.

Worse than that, it was in the context of the ACLU's battle with the Patriot act, which means that they just tried to censor (for reasons of "national security") information about censorship (for reasons of "national security"). Here's the redacted paragraph:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

Mindblowing, huh?

Thanks to the Memory Hole for catching this.

Liberal Hawks and "GreyProp"

Ok, I have access for a little while, so here's a longer piece.

Atrios wrote a very insightful piece yesterday about the problem with many liberals that supported the invasion of Iraq- that despite the clear reality that there were no weapons of mass destruction or indication that it'd accomplish any of its goals, those who opposed it at the time are marginalized. Not were, are. Atrios (echoing Tim Noah) considers that insane. Atrios described it as a liberal "testosterone test". Some people got mad at him, largely liberal hawks like ogged who are pissed at Atrios "hounding liberals who supported the war", but he's more right than wrong. Another, Jack O'Toole, asks "does [Atrios] really believe that people like me -- people who've spent our lives fighting for the same progressive ideals that he holds dear -- could possibly think that way?"

Atrios drew the distinction. I don't. Sorry, ogged and O'Toole, but your attitudes weren't part of the problem, they WERE the problem.

The key issue, however, isn't Iraq and never was. The problem is unity and division. I've brought this up many times, but the key strength of the right and key weakness of the left is that the right gets to define all the issues, and thus remains publicly united when it comes to dealing with both domestic and foreign policy issues. People on the right disagree, but they agree to table their disagreements when dealing with the "other guy"... the liberals and the left. Part of this is due to the visceral loathing that most have for both the liberal left, but it goes further than that, and it gets back to liberal hawks.

Many (if not practically all) Liberal hawks (along with "centrist" liberals) are naturally focused on legitimacy. They want to be part of the discussion, but it's a discussion that the right has framed. They are, further, either unwilling to change that framing, or are ignorant that it is even taking place. Thus, in order to gain legitimacy, they need to accept the framing concepts that the right has built up. This means that they're essentially doomed, of course, because they're fighting on foreign terrain... but if you see this as a choice between relevance or irrelevance, then anybody sane would choose the former, right?

Unfortunately for them, the right has little interest in actually dialoguing with them. What they provide is legitimacy for the right's arguments... the classic "even the liberal [insert name here]" argument that we're all familiar with. It's the classic intelligence concept of "grey (or black) propaganda"... you know that your opponents aren't going to listen to you, so you get some that is presumably "neutral" or even "opposed" to make your arguments for you. It works spectacularly well, as we've all seen, especially when they're doing it of their own free will. They are quoted and used to the extent that this role is necessary, then are thrown away. Of course, they're all familiar with this too, but the argument remains... isn't it better to be relevant?

The weapon that they provide, however, is aimed squarely at those who could actually change the framework of the debate. There are, naturally, a lot of people on both the liberal and radical left who don't accept the framework, and attempt to break out of it. The radicals pretty much exist entirely for this purpose... it is their raison d'etre, and whatever disagreements that liberals have with them, it's an important role. (Yes, this includes the protest movement.) Even relatively "normal" liberals, however, often question a lot of the conventional wisdom and accepted assumptions that provide the framework of debates. Were the left in the United States akin to the right (or, for that matter, the left in, say, Canada... the situation is quite a bit different there), this would mean a tug of war between framers on the left and framers on the right, with the actual debate being held somewhere in between. This is where that legitimacy becomes critical for the American right, however, because they use those liberal hawks to ensure their framing assumptions are dominant. The same does not exist on the left, because the right simply doesn't have the same numbers or kinds of legitimacy-granting "opponents".

The practical upshot? The right (nominally the Republicans, but of course it's bigger than that) depended on their "Saddam was going to build WMDs and ruin the region" story to support the invasion, and by selectively choosing which liberals to praise by making the "proper" arguments for a "proper" dialogue, they ensured that those on the left who depend on access and acceptance by their rivals on the right will grant the legitimacy they need and force out those who are looking at the situation through a different set of assumptions. They knew that arguments by self-named "liberals" would carry much greater weight as classic grey (or, perhaps, black) propaganda. They put the machine into motion, the usual suspects came through for them, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly until they had the error of their assumption shoved brutally in their faces.

This creates a problem for the right, but they still control the frame. It creates a much BIGGER problem for liberal hawks, because the one source of power they have-- legitimacy-- is utterly threatened. Thus we get to where we are, where we end up with the bizarre situation where you can't be taken "seriously" unless you made a massive mistake. The fundamental problem of the left cannibalizing itself remains, and as long as it does, this sort of DoubleThink isn't going anywhere.

Fortunately, the solution is simple, and somewhat embodied in something O'Toole said. He said "When demagogues like Andrew Sullivan challenge the motives (i.e., the patriotism) of the liberal wing of the Democratic party, I stand shoulder to shoulder with my friends". It's a good start, but it doesn't go far enough. What liberals (not merely Democrats) need to do is accept that trying to leech acceptability from those who are opposed to everything you stand for is a mug's game. You're being used and thrown away. When somebody like Scott Ritter comes up and says "I was right, and you didn't believe me", the general liberal response should be and must be "you were right, we were wrong, we apologize to those whom we so thoroughly denigrated before the war and pledge to put away the right's convenient filters and listen to you in the future". Then, when the time comes, somebody other than Paul Krugman needs to speak up and say "these people have a point, they're not 'un-American', and we'll stand up for them and pay close attention to what they have to say, no matter what kind of flak we get."

Just stop being tools. It doesn't mean you have to agree with ANSWER or whatever, but stop being tools. It's demeaning, and it's why liberals continue to struggle.

Edit: One other thing. O'Toole said that cheap shots should be left to people like the RNC. No. Wrong. Utterly wrong. This "holier than thou" attitude is one of the best GreyProp weapons out there, because its melding with liberal equivocation lends even the most scurrilous attack credibility by being even dimly associated with those who "behave better". ("Sure, Rush said some horrible stuff, but this other liberal guy said something like it, and he's a LIBERAL and above this sort of thing. Maybe Rush is just 'overstating' an essential truth, and those who are attacking him are just covering their asses.")

If you're a centrist liberal who has been playing the legitimacy game, then you're hurting people you should be helping. Period. Take your medicine and start laying off the "own goals".