Taken to task

Robert Farley is right, and I've been guilty of this as well, most recently calling Michael Gordon's article on Iranian arms "propaganda." It wasn't and Michael Gordon isn't a propagandist.

Here's what I wish. I wish that the blogosphere could think in less dispositional terms. When Gordon, or anyone else, writes a bad article, we tend to attack them on dispositional terms; Gordon failed because he's a friend of the administration, an arrogant stenographer, a neocon, etc. We don't have a vocabulary that, for lack of a better phrase, allows us to hate the sin and love the sinner. I love the blogosphere, but I loathe this aspect of it. A few weeks ago, we all had a terrific rage fest against the hack pundit Joe Klein. Then, Klein started to write things that we liked, and the declarations of hackishness and bad faith went away. I still think that Joe Klein is a hack, but that's rather beside the point; he's either a hack or he's not, and just because he starts directing his hackery in directions we like doesn't change that fact. Same thing with the various writers for the New Republic, the blogospheric reaction to whom vacillates wildly between "foul servant of Dark Lord Peretz" and "Oh, hey, that's an interesting point". To use a nearer and dearer example, only part of what makes me loathe Mickey Kaus is his political position; much more irritating to me is his manifest inability to convey a thought in writing and his trivial approach to political questions.

Maureen Dowd elicits a similar response. We love and quote her when she delivers a scathing attack on Cheney and Bush, then revile her for her snearing, mean girl attacks on the Clintons, which, in fact got her a Pulitzer, believe it or not. But unlike Mickey Kaus, Dowd actually has real power because, not only can she unleash a devastating hit, she has the entire New York Times behind her. Her kneecapping of Al Gore helped get the Miserable Failure elected. Her taking Bush down now seems a case of a dollar short and a day late. In 2000, she was a key ingredient in the mistaken impression that Gore was a "serial exaggerator," just another "liar" like Clinton, and an out-of-touch elitist whose ever shape-changing was so much in contrast to the "authentic" guy you'd like to invite to your BBQ, George W. Bush. She harped on that week after week and it had real consequences. I still like reading Dowd, she's funny and can write, but the blogosphere exists to make sure she's not attacking our candidates for things they never said. Yeah, it's her job to nab them when they do come across as petty or inauthentic, but she is to be reviled if she's simply making shit up, because as you can see from the link, a lot of other "opinion leaders" jump in the car with her when she does.

So, back to Mr. Farley, it's a troubling characteristic of the blogosphere, but in the case of writers like Klein and Dowd, who have privileged seats in the media pantheon, the tendency to attack them in "dispositional terms" is probably necessary and certainly unavoidable.