Okay, so the Mudcat train wreck continues:
1.-Nowhere in my first post did I say I was “anti-blogging”. Quite to the contrary, I said to bloggers who want to take the Democratic Party back into the big tent, “God bless you and thank you.” I was quoted saying after the Webb election that the “bloggers” led the way. As Casey Stengel said, “You can look it up.” The problem I’ve got is I’m “anti-losing” and don’t like a small group of intolerant, intellectually-elites continuously trying to shape the “Big Tent” into a “Pup Tent”. The blogs are the Democratic Party’s greatest source of power and unity. Why would I am be anti-blogging? In other words, I wasn’t talking to all of you. Just some of you.
Who, precisely? That’s what I’d like to know. Who are the bloggers that are so defiling “Mudcat’s” ideas of what the political conversation should be. Can he give us a list? Some URLs, maybe?
And here’s where this begins to interest me. Before, it was just some has-been shooting his mouth off, one hand on the keyboard and the other on his dick, mourning the fact that it was no longer 1996 and not really any different from Carville and a dozen other shitweasels out there. Now, “Mudcat” has veered into an area I find really tasty, where he’s just gotten smacked in the face with the kind of challenge people who blog all the time are always facing, which is that everybody wants to talk to you about the stuff you write, and nobody shows you any respect you haven’t earned, and everybody’s in your face all the time and if you aren’t the kind of person who thrives on that (hell, even if you are) it’s absolutely fucking exhausting.
What “Mudcat” hasn’t figured out yet is that if you’re gonna throw out there that some people suck, you’ve got to expect at some point that commenters are going to ask exactly who you’re calling out. You’ve got to expect that at some point people are going to say, “Is it me, you’re talking about, and if so, FUCK YOU,” and similar things. If you’re going to make statements, statements which could be interpreted as derogatory to large portions of the audience you’re addressing, you’d damn well better be ready to answer back when somebody stands up and calls you an asshole.
We’ve seen this over and over again, with Deborah Howell and that splendid implement Jeffrey Dvorkin and with Joe Klein himself, with anybody who’s ever run head first into a mess of their own making in the blogosphere having gotten something wrong and refused to correct it, or said something questionable and gotten pissy and entitled when it was questioned. People don’t get the first thing about this medium, which is that if you’re just here to pontificate, you should probably do something else. People are here to talk. Some of them are nice. Some of them are mean. Some of them are awesome. Some of them suck. But they’re all going to talk to you and if that scares you, if the idea of having to confront the shortcomings of your own half-assed assertions and slurs on people who attend the opera is just too much for your sweet little sensibilities to bear, I suggest you find another outlet through which to communicate your ideas of your own greatness to the unworthy masses. I hear the wireless is big with the kids these days.
And not for nothing, but cultivating a focus-group-tested Southern Tough-Guy persona is made a little more difficult when you whine and cry because people on the Internet called you rude names, Mudcat.
Schmuck.
A.