August 4, 2008

About Those “400 Bloggers Hired by Barack Obama”…

Back in May, I pissed off a lot of Obama supporters (and delighted everyone else) with the Pocket Guide to Obamaniac Behavior. Since then, a lot of people have been citing the “Pocket Guide” post as if it had something to do with the unsubstantiated rumor that the Obama campaign had hired “400 bloggers” to “fan out” over the Web.

The source of this rumor, as far as I can tell, is HillBuzz (which has since changed blogging hosts), where a single word — “apparently” — linked to my Pocket Guide post implied that we here at the Newswire had said that the Obama campaign “hired 400 bloggers to influence the public discourse and sway Hillary voters to ‘remember we are all Democrats’, to give up Clinton’s cause, and to become dutiful citizens of the Obama Nation.”

How HillBuzz made that nonexistent connection, I don’t know, but, frankly — while I don’t have anything against HillBuzz — it’s pissing me off. Sites all over the Web keep pointing to the Lavender Newswire as the source of this rumor — even though HillBuzz, thankfully, has since edited their original post to clarify that the rumor was started by a scroll at the bottom of the screen during a Fox News broadcast. Whether that’s true or not, who the hell knows? It is Fox News, after all — and yet nobody knows who first saw this alleged scroll in the first place.

Get this straight, Obama supporters and non-supporters alike: The Lavender Newswire did NOT start the “paid bloggers” rumor. Read the whole post in question yourself and see if there’s so much a remote implication of any such thing.

Tell me, where is it?

And, no, Patrick McKinnion at Yes to Democracy, the post was not “edited after the fact.” What you see in that post now has not changed, down to the last semicolon, since it was posted on May 11, 2008, at 7:16 p.m.

I’ve ignored the whole “400 bloggers” rumor since I first saw it on HillBuzz because I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire (when you deny something, that immediately makes you suspect). But when some dude I’ve never heard of starts planting the seed that one of my posts was edited to cover up an unsubstantiated rumor — and when said dude implies by association that I am a PUMA (I may share some of the PUMAs’ sentiment, and there are many PUMAs I like and admire, but I am not part of the club, and have never been) — then it’s time to set the record straight. So to speak.

HillBuzz got it wrong. And every blogger, pro- or anti-Obama, pro- or anti-Clinton, who’s ever picked up on HillBuzz’s implication that the Lavender Newswire had anything whatsoever to do with the “400 paid bloggers” rumor got it wrong. I am certain there was no deliberate malice on anyone’s part — but, goddamnit, you’ve got it wrong, and I will not stand by and allow the Lavender Newswire to become collateral damage in the war between Obama supporters and Hillary supporters.

This would also be a good time to tell the Obama-Hillary warring factions something else, too: We at the Newswire do not have a dog in this fight. Period. We can’t stand the sight or sound of Barack Obama, and we find John McCain utterly despicable. The perception that we’ve been “attacking” Obama¹ because we support McCain is so dead wrong, it isn’t even funny. We would rather jam red-hot pokers into our skulls than cast a vote for that jackass.²

And the perception that we “attack” Barack Obama at all is just that: perception. All we (mostly I) have ever done is write: “This is what Barack Obama did today, and this is yet another reason I don’t want him to be POTUS” — as well as: “This is what this Obama supporter, or that Obama supporter, or this group of Obama supporters, did today, and this is yet another reason we think they’re bullies and thugs.”

The Pocket Guide post was nothing more or less than my observation of the way Obama supporters march in lockstep, “as if The Big Giant Head at Obama Central texted new marching orders to the cell phones (or perhaps directly into the brain-chip implants) of all Obamaniacs simultaneously.”

I can’t stop anyone from reading whatever they want into anything I write, but when baseless misperception casts a negative light on the Lavender Newswire, then it’s time to stop this foolishness dead in its tracks.

As for the Pocket Guide post itself, I wouldn’t write the same thing today, for one simple reason: Most Obama supporters who were roaring drunk on the Kool-Aid a few months ago have sobered up, and are suffering from a pretty ferocious hangover right now. I’m not above kicking somebody when they’re down, but the majority of Obama supporters — except for the new “converts” (and pseudo-converts; i.e., trolls) from the Republican side who are skewing Obama’s base far-right — were once my fellow Democrats³, after all, and I still remember our solidarity, B.O. (Before Obama). Simply put, there’s no point in rubbing even more salt into their open wounds now. They get it now. (Well, a lot of them do.)

It turned out just as thought it would when I wrote this on Democratic Underground back in February:

If the level of vitriol weren’t so far off the scale, I might feel sorry for those too swept up in the mania to have a clue. Not so strangely, though, I now feel some genuine pity for Bush supporters who didn’t see their big fall coming, either — because now I am observing exactly how it happened, only within my own party. It’s quite an eye-opener… and it makes me far less inclined these days to call all Bush supporters braindead idiots — or I would be compelled to call Obama supporters braindead idiots as well. And (despite what the BO lovers here will think), I don’t think Obama supporters are stupid — just swept away.

Now, Obama could get elected, and he could become a terrific president. (I don’t believe that for a minute, but let’s just say it could happen, for the sake of argument.) But no matter what he does, his supporters have set the bar so high that the first time he doesn’t walk on water, they’re going to be as crushed as… well, teenyboppers who were practically suicidal when Paul McCartney got married (or Donny Osmond, or whoever the Flavor of the Decade is).

It’s the ol’ pinprick to the bubble of cognitive dissonance, and the results ain’t gonna be pretty. I just hope I’ll be able to be big enough to help them pick up their shattered dreams, and not just stand back and say “I told you so.”

I added: “Hmm… No, I don’t know if I can be that big. In fact, I doubt it.” And I did, in fact, end up writing several “I told you so” posts here over the next few months (like this one, and this one, and this one).

A few days later, I wrote:

…should Obama lose the GE, I’ll actually feel very sorry for his supporters, who, having invested so much emotional energy into the man and pinning such sky-high “hope” on his salvation of Planet Earth, have a much longer way to fall than I do.

But it didn’t take that long for the big fall. As soon as Hillary dropped out, Obama started proving to his followers that he was never the liberal Messiah they had projected onto his “blank screen.” Hardly anyone cared that he was (is) staunchly opposed to marriage equality (if you’re not gay, why should you care? our silly little civil rights are just a “wedge issue,” or so we’re told), but when he started showing his true colors⁴ on issues that go right to the heart of progressive democracy (NAFTA, FISA, campaign financing, the death penalty, the Iraq pull-out timeline, etc.)… well, he didn’t need any help from me to show his followers that he wasn’t all that and a bag of chips.

By the time Obama betrayed his (progressive) supporters yet again with his offshore drilling “compromise,” I didn’t have the heart to stick it to the Obamaniacs again. Most of them already get it, big-time; just look to DU to see how blind enthusiasm for Obama has devolved into a steady round of “I’ll hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, but I’m not happy about it.”

So, I’m not as angry at Obama supporters as I was a few months ago. Angry, yes, but not as angry. What made me so angry was not that Obama had betrayed me (I never believed in him enough to allow myself to be betrayed), but that my fellow Democrats had betrayed me. They were (and many still are) downright rotten and nasty and superior about it. But for those whose braggadocio has been shot to hell… Meh, why bother?

Of course, I reserve the right to kick ‘em in the slats (figuratively speaking) if they start hitting the Obama Juice that hard again.

But I digress, as usual.

The bottom line: I never wrote (or said) that Barack Obama had hired paid bloggers. Buffy never wrote (or said) that Barack Obama had hired paid bloggers. We never even implied it.

The scapegoat you Obama supporters are looking for is not here, and never was. “Evidence” of the “paid bloggers” rumor you Hillary supporters are looking for is not here, and never was.

So cut the shit, now. That means everybody.

¹ Never mind that when we find a genuine, unfounded attack on Obama, we point it out. Granted, there’s only been one time I recall being compelled to defend Obama… but still.

² Of course, some people see everything in black and white — a lot of “Democrats” throw the first notion of democracy itself right out the window when they hit us with: “Yeah? What’re ya gonna do, vote Republican?” Faced with the reply, “There are more than two choices, you know,” you can feel the disdain fly at you like a spitwad: “What’re ya gonna do, vote Green?“

Yeah, folks, I’m gonna vote Green. It’s not a protest vote. It’s not a vote against anyone, but a vote for who (and what) I believe in. I don’t believe in Barack Obama, and I certainly don’t believe in John McCain — and I’m sick and tired of voting against my own best interests. This time, I’m voting for my own best interest, and everyone else’s, whether they realize it or not.

If everyone in this country voted for what they really believed in, the two major parties would be the Greens and the Republican-Democrats (with the usual undecideds hovering between the Libertarians and the Socialists).

In the end, it’s my vote, and nobody gets to take it for granted. I wish everyone else felt the same way.

³ I haven’t done The Deed — change my registration from Democratic to unaffiliated — yet — but that’s only for a lack of time and too many other things going on in my life right now. But I am no longer a Democrat. I am a liberal (a “progressive,” if you prefer — if you’re the sort who thinks “liberal” is a dirty word), and as the Democratic Party pulls further and further to the right, I see now that the Obama supporters were right when they told me: “You’re not a real Democrat.” Seeing what the Democratic Party has become (especially under Howard Dean, who was my Obama; I believed in him with every fiber of my being until I realized he had me fooled into thinking he was something he never was: a liberal), I’m not a real Democrat — I am a liberal beholden to no party. I think for myself, and I vote true to my convictions. And anybody who doesn’t like it can go pound salt..

⁴ I can’t in good conscience say he’s flip-flopped on every issue; he really hasn’t changed his position on many issues — he just allowed his supporters to lead themselves, and each other, around by the nose, and think he was more progressive than he really was.

As I wrote last month: “Obama sold himself on the ideal of ‘change’ everybody wanted, and then pulled the rug right out from under those gullible enough to buy the hype without taking a critical look at the man himself. They bought into that ‘blank screen’ business.”

Frankly, I’m not sure Obama really is a conservative; I truly believe that if, for instance, marriage equality were overwhelmingly popular among whatever set of voters he was trying to woo at a given moment, he’d be 150% in our corner. I just don’t believe he stands for anything, except that which will get him the most money, and the most votes.

Even Jeremiah Wright knew that.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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