It’s amazing to watch how phrases – like that – suddenly flash up on Memeorandum and my RSS reader, in an almost-balletic display of coordinated rhetoric.<\/p>\n
It pisses me off, because it’s a transparent substitute for real thought and criticism, and turns the people who should be talking about the campaign – folks like Kevin Drum, Josh Marshall and Ezra Klein – into copyboys for the political talking point of the day.<\/p>\n
It’s almost like they coordinated what they were doing…<\/p>\n
<\/i>(a quote from Mickey K<\/a>, in a 2007 post of mine<\/a>):<\/p>\n Another party I’m not invited to. And you aren’t either: Vlogging fogey lashes out at ur-whippersnapper Ezra Klein<\/a>, upon learning that Klein has created a private Townhouse<\/a>-like email group where liberal bloggers and editors hash out issues before they let the public in on the discussion. … P.S.<\/span>: Yes, I have private email discussions too, and there are probably some advantages in having these talks in front of a group instead of one-on-one. (If, say, Sidney Blumenthal emails five leftish bloggers privately, all five might think they have an exclusive. If they compare notes, they won’t.). But the innovative virtue of Web journalism, I’ve always thought, is that it makes the back and forth process of argument and investigation relatively transparent to everyone<\/em>. If the Klein Klub succeeds, isn’t there a threat that it will a) compromise independence, in part because participants will always worry if they are using something that should be kept private and will feel they owe the other members; b) will encourage groupthink, as everyone works out the tacit party line before presenting it to their sheeple-like readers; c) encourage propgandism (see (b)); and d) become the place where the real conversation happens, a conversation the non-elite public isn’t privy to. … P.P.S.<\/span>: Who’s in the Klein Klub? Have they published a list of names? The sheeple demand to know at least that! … P.P.P.S.<\/span>: Chait, I know you’re in it. Who else? … <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n