And if, on that panel, I could screen one teevee show to kickstart a pungent conversation, I would bypass all the usual documentary material, economic, environmental and diversity programming, and the look-with-alarm stuff about Hate Radio and Fox News and instead show "Hardhome" -- last night's episode of Game of Thrones. It was funny in parts and wise about how politics between grown-ups actually works, but mostly I would want those assembled to hear and react to this brutally practical advice:
My name is Jon Snow. I’m Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch.
We’re not friends.
We’ve never been friends.
This isn’t about friendship.
This is about survival.
This is about putting a 700 foot wall between you and what’s out there.
If we coulda swung it, I'm sure my wife and I would have enjoyed attending Netroot Nation this year, if only to swap hugs and handshakes and conversation with all the terrific fellow travelers with whom we interact online but rarely have a chance to meet IRL.
However, as Brother Charles Pierce points out, lately when the Liberals tribes gather we find new and exciting ways to carve each other up in public, whereas when the objectively insane Conservative tribes get together, they find a way to fucking well make it rain. Their antics dominate the news cycle and echo onward for weeks, and no Republican of the First Water would dare not make the wingnut hajj to kiss the crazy ring:
Again, having attended both CPAC and Netroots this year, the difference between the power of the two gatherings over the respective political parties to which they generally gravitate was more startling this year than ever before. Certainly, there was loud rumbling of internal discontent at CPAC, too, but there wasn't a prominent Republican in the country that dared not show up. (And there were several panels about the severe mistreatment of the Keystone pipeline by environmental extremists, wah-dee-doo-dah.) CPAC was loud and noisy and fun. Netroots was simply dead-assed. One convention felt like a movement. The other felt like a trade show.
When I attended Netroots in 2007, it felt like a movement. There were hundreds of credentialed journalists from all over the world. Every Democratic candidate running for president (save one) -- and plenty who weren't -- showed up, even at the risk of getting booed (for the record, I in attendance at the Obama breakout session seen in the video above.) And Subcommander Markos swung enough cod to get a place at the table on Meet the Press:
Seven years later, so far as I can tell, the entire net media result of Netroots has been to give Steve Kornacki another reason to talk even more about whether Progressives like "Hillary 2016!", or like-like her on his "Good Morning, New Jersey!" MSNBC teevee show --
-- and a single Politico story about Netroots and..."Hillary 2016!":
...
There is hope for Hillary Clinton …
Netroots attendees hail from the most liberal corners of the Democratic Party. To them Clinton is simply too conservative on fiscal and foreign policy matters. They see the former New York senator as tight with Wall Street, and she doesn’t strike them as willing to fight for working people the way Warren does.
Yet interviews with several attendees suggest it’s not a lost cause for Clinton. If she distances herself from big business, highlights her support for labor — a point that came up several times here, given the big union representation at the conference — and demonstrates she cares about the struggles of ordinary Americans, she could go a long way with this group...
This is all well above my pay grade and in the nearly 10 years I have been blogging, nobody at Liberal CentCom has ever asked my opinion about anything (although the fundraising emails come in every hour on the hour like clockwork), but it gets a little harder every year to rally people to the Cause, when the Cause can't seem to get its shit together enough to not shoot itself gratuitously in the foot.
Not impossible, but every year a little harder than it needs to be.
So even though Mr. Pierce has already used the reference, offhand I can't think of one that is more appropriate:
Netroots Nation is going to Arizona, Daily Kos is not
by kos
SAT JUL 19, 2014 AT 12:54 AM PDT
Netroots Nation announced two days ago that Phoenix, Arizona would host its 2015 conference. I wish the conference the best, but it will unfortunately take place without Daily Kos' attendance or assistance.
I made very clear in the wake of Arizona's passage of SB 1070 that I would not be setting foot in the state, nor spending a dime in it until the law was revoked. The law, however gutted by the courts, remains on the books, as does systemic harassment of Latinos, so my pledge still stands...
Every now and then I am reminded how very far I am from anywhere near the center of anything.
Brother Charles Pierce points out a thing which is so baseline, indisputably true that should it should long ago have become part of the pre-show checklist for every public interest teevee show in the land, along with "Your hair looks fine" and "We're live when the little red light goes on" and "Don't freak out when you see how empty and soulless David Gregory's eyes are up-close. Lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he opens his pie-hole and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch 'But Both Sides!' and spite of all your bloggin' and the hollerin' they all come in and rip you to pieces."
It seems almost pointless to mention this but there is simply no state Democratic party in any of the 50 states that is so clearly, obviously demented. This is the Republican Party. Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru are not. In fact, I think all those bold conservative thinkers of whom the New York Times thinks so much should bring their Big Ideas down to the next Texas state Republican convention and see how far they get. John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell, and especially obvious anagram Reince Priebus, who nominally presides over Bedlam, need to be asked every day which parts of the Texas Republican platform they support and which parts they don't. They don't get to use the crazies to get elected and then hide behind fake Washington politesse when the howls from the hinterlands get too loud. We allow ourselves only two major political parties. One of them is completely out of its fcking mind. This is a national problem.
Yes, that is one point of view.
Another point of view that has currency with some profound thinkers with large, international audiences is that Democratic voters should stand aside on purpose and let the crazies ride to power and pound the fuck out of the country from some undetermined period of time. After which the Leprechauns of Liberty will ride the Unicorns of Freedom back from Big Rock Candy Mountain and restore America to greatness. At the moment, two most famous proponents of this theory of social reform are Ra's Al Ghul:
And Glenn Greenwald:
Yet a third point of view is offered by America's Second Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual on his Pot-'n-Popes-'n-Stuff blog where he councils Liberals to quit kvetching and celebrate, because now that support for his two issues -- pot and same-sex marriage -- have turned a corner, it's game over for wingnuts and we Leftists should be more magnanimous in victory.
How delightful it would be if, in the grand American tradition, these three white men were to gather together in the spirit of Lincoln and Douglas and put their beliefs to the test in a big, public arena in the heart of the great state of Texas!
...My friend Tupac Pelosi-Mumia, who lives with his parents Marge and Fred Bosley in Beverly Hills (“I kills me that they forced me to drive a Mercedes bought with his money made oppressing the workers at his department stores, but I do it for the sake of the struggle”), told me about a terrifying encounter he had with a couple of rampaging conservatives. All he did was throw a free range egg at them during a “No Free Speech for Fascists” demonstration there by Take Back the Mid-Day, his pro-civil liberties collective.
“They were going to give me a wedgie,” he reported, “But the surprise was on them — I don’t believe in wearing underwear! It’s part of the patriarchal paradigm!” The brutality of the wingnuts is truly terrifying. “Those conservatives are tough and mean and they will kick your ass,” Tupac said. “And that’s just the women.”
There were so many panels to choose from! I couldn’t decide on whether to go to “Gender Justice and Making Men Pay” or “Azatlan Now: Getting the US Out of North America,” so I just wandered around to see what superstars I could run into. It was awesome – I even got to shake Keith Olbermann’s hand, but he was kind of cold to me after I told him “I will totally watch your show as soon as I can find the Logo channel!” It is the Logo network, right? Or is it the Oprah one?
Plenty of petitions to sign too – I love getting involved in hand-on activism that makes a difference! I signed petitions about banning eating whales, tuna, beef, pigs, and chicken. I kind of drew the line at the super-vegan guys – call me a “bean curd criminal,” but as far as I’m concerned, you’ll have to pry my tofu out of my mom’s fridge.
I also signed some green energy petitions but had to stop to answer a call from United telling me my upgrade came through for the flight home – bingo! Finally, some guys dressed like pimps told me all about this deadly poison the capitalists are forcing on us called dihydrogen monoxide. I never took a science course at Berkeley since I didn’t have time as a double major in Womyn’s Literature and Oppression Studies...
It goes on and on like that.
Perhaps you can see why rarely bother trying to persuade Conservatives of anything anymore?
Between 9/10ths of the Conservative Movement who masturbate themselves blind in giggly, vicarious dread at the awful awfulness of the Cartoon Dirty Fucking Hippie Emmanuel Goldstein's their Brain Caste as created to keep their tiny minds off of just how fucked Conservatism has left this country (from "Hating Goldstein")...
... There is no Big Brother bestriding the Right, because there doesn't need to be: because the one, genuine innovation of the Right has been to spend 40 years carefully cultivating a dumbed-down Base which at this point are little more than reprogrammable Golem.
Whatever they are told today through the Right's trusted in-house organs, they will believe.
Whatever those in-house sources tell them tomorrow -- even if it is in 180 degree opposition to what they were told today -- they will believe.
..and the remaining, Expatriate 1/10th of the Conservative Movement who lament the loss of the Glorious Imaginary Conservative Movement That Never Was, and strain their intellectual muscles extravagantly noticing -- finally and far-too-late -- just a fraction of what the Dirty Fucking Hippies have been trying to tell them for the last 30 years (Here, Andrew Sullivan actually has the balls to brag that his 2006 book finally taking note of the capture of the Right by the Fundamentalists was "a little ahead of its time"), I have no patience left for anyone on the Right.
They are the millstone around our cultural neck, and their continued, toxic influence is the single largest impediment to repairing the terrible damage they have inflicted on our nation.
A strong contender for this weekend's "Most Pitiable Sight" award must go to Wall Street Journal sock puppet John Fund, who I spotted skulking around the Netroots' conference room level of the Minneapolis Convention Center trailing eager-beaver, 3rd tier wingnut Warren Todd Huston like some latter-day, Randite George and Lennie from "Of Mice and Men".
It is such a stark and pathetic reminder of the fundamentally peevish and parasitic nature of the Right that they would build an entire movement and schedule entire conferences around the act of hating people like me.
That they would shadow us from city to city just to do so.
That the barrenness of their ideological cupboard is now so complete that a Wall Street Journal douchbag from New York and a mid-level wingnut talking point Pez dispenser from Chicago would travel all the way to Minnesota just to slink around among the happy energetic Liberals to grub for crumbs of incipient socialism About Which They Can Be Loudly Outraged, and crib notes about what panels the Dirty Fucking Hippies had put together to destroy America.
Local Breitbart Clone uses adulterated video to justify 20,568th consecutive unhinged rant against Those Evil Liberals Who Are Destroying America (this time the target was ThinkProgress.com.) ...
Future historians take note: This is what it looked like when the Right stopped merely drinking the Koolaid and started injecting it directly into their spines.
Perhaps here, in the land of Mary Richards, Mr. Huston can finally turn the world on with his smile and
Having been here a couple of days now with a big chunk of time admittedly taken up with other matters, two things I have noticed about this year's Netroots:
Buncha A-Listers are MIA.
Virtually no major media.
Granted, my previous experience was at NN Chicago, which drew every major Democratic candidate for president, and an assload of national and international media.
It was Big News.
Then -- wham -- the Age of the Blogosphere was over. Too bad you missed it. Very quickly the idea of several thousand Liberal members of the Reality Based community gathering under one roof to debate America's complex problems and propose some real solutions was once again of no interest to the Elite Media whatsoever. Just another wacky "water skiing squirrel" filler bit to have on-hand to pad out a loose half-hour. Instead, a handful of Bush Regime dead-enders in funny hats ranting about Big Gummint and Death Panels at a Ramada Inn in St. Reagandale, Florida could now command the attention of major news outlets.
Wall-to-wall.
Week after week after week.
It was Big News.
It was the new-new thing...despite the fact that it was overwhelmingly obvious to anyone with two functioning synapses to rub together that the Tea Baggers were nothing new at all: that they were just the same old wingnut gleeps with a new paint job and an unlimited line of credit from Koch Industries and Fox News.
But it was in no one's professional interest to look at the shiny new-new thing too closely. Or at all. Except of course those fucking Liberals, and by 2009, Liberals had once again ceased to exist anyway: not because we hadn't been proven right -- over and over and over again -- but because the moral consequences of what we were saying were too culturally and financially terrifying for our media to bear.
So where were the major networks? The powerhouse journals? Where was the Liberal New York Times? MSNBC?
Busy. Don't ask.
Instead bear-baiting freaks like Andrew Brietbart were once again handed a big wad of free air time to try to hustle his resume.
Mic’d up and with a camera crew in tow, the Big Government blogger — and recent toppler of Rep. Anthony Weiner — came looking for a confrontation at this gathering of 2,500 progressive activists.
And he got one: Dozens of progressive activists and bloggers quickly surrounded him, yelling and shooting him with cameras of their own in a frenzy that quickly drew photographers to surround them.
Liberal activists booed an unpaid intern for Barack Obama’s campaign arm Thursday night after he defended the president’s record on gay rights during a Netroots Nation breakout session.
Even here in flyover country with no Senate filibuster showdown or election looming, there is content enough here for dozens of compelling stories waiting on silver platters to fill the content-starved maw of the Media Beast, so why the desertion-in-force?
Well these are not things we little people need to trouble our silly little heads about.
Because they're, y'know,
man-talk.
On another topic altogether, “This Week with Christiane Amanpour...” will once again hand over a massive slice of America's public airwaves to dyspeptic old ruin John McCain and blood-soaked hellspawn Liz Cheney.
Oh wait, I guess that's not another topic altogether, is it?
When the summer cold that BG and I have been carefully cultivating landed on me with both feet.
The downside: I'm going to be loopy from cold meds all day, so if you see me, discount about 17% of my weirdness.
The upside: It is possible that, loopy from cold meds, I snuck out of the Liberal Enclave last night and carefully pre-moistened and then coughed on every doorknob in the Right Online's Wingnut Enclave.
The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. -- Saint Augustine
On the road with the Professional Left.
Pictured above is Blue Gal editing the component parts of the podcast you are listening to into a confection that pleased our ears (her PC with all of her magic tricks took a hit before we arrived here, so we are making-do with a hand-held tape recorder and the software she downloaded onto my ancient...Old Timey... vintage machine.)
Pictured also are my giant feet nude body parts. Please feel free to tweet the hell out of them and send them along to Andrew Breitbart who can wax his little Pope to them to his heart's content and then use them as a Wang of Damocles to hold over my head, as is apparently the custom of our strange times.
With any luck, the Democratic Party will ask me politely to leave :-)
Having fun and meeting fellow travelers.
More later.
UPDATE: Off to the Alliance for American Manufacturing fashion show and party. Hope to see you there.
... It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.
Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.
It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?
Pictured here are Fran / Blue Gal, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, and DFA Communications Director Levana Leyendecker.
Behind the camera, me.
Herr Doktor Governor Mister Dean gave a fine speech, as did Russ Feingold.
We sat in the back, having a couple of beers, cracking wise with Dave Neiwert and meeting some fine people, including the Glitter Bandit Nick Espinosa
who is a fine young man who wears his values like a suit of armor, but who you may know from most your Elite Media either as "man", "gay man", "a protester" or "a gay protester".
1. Get me and Blue Gal to Netroots Nation this year. 2. Schmooze like a barrel of Clintons. 3. Sell our blogs to AOL for $315,000,001.00. 4. Go to Netroots Nation next year and chair a panel on "How to sell your blogs to AOL for $315,000,001.00."
The Flaw:
Weez broke.
The Solution:
1. Get BG a DFA scholarship ASAP (hopefully with a small stipend to buy more acronyms.) 2. Slip me in in her steamer trunk. 3. Party in her room until Margaret Dumont ruins everything.
Dear perky "activist@netrootsnation.org" autobot masquerading as "Karen, Mary, Navi, Nolan and Raven!":
For the 332nd time, let me remind you that as I am currently broke and unemployed, I will not be attending NN this year.
Not.
Therefore it is very unlikely that you will "See (me) next week!" Or see me at all given that you are a little plastic cube on a server farm somewhere and have never responded to one of my replies in the past.
However your many cheerfully oblivious, automated messages telling my broke, unemployed ass where to go and what to do -- so reminiscent of the Ray Bradbury story about an abandoned, planet-wide computer system that keeps tormenting the last man on Mars with false hopes of rescue -- do make me smile.
I eagerly await your next missive and hope it arrives full of mass-produced upbeatness.
And singing, "Daisy..."
Veeeeeeery slowly,
Yours in Christ,
driftglass
UPDATE: The Netroots people have contacted me and assured me that they are A) not robot assassins from the 23rd century sent back in time to irritate me for some inscrutable reasons of their own (but of course what else would you expect time-traveling robot assassins from the 23rd century to say?) and, B) they thought it was "witty".
Which was very decent of them.
On the other hand, the deep, emotional trauma I suffered at their allegedly-carbon-based hands would heal a LOT quicker if they were to send a couple of plane tickets, the price of a hotel room and a couple of comped NN registrations packages my way.
Then...maybe...I could begin...to learn to...love again.
They sent me one of those electronic mail thingies -- every bit as stirringly personal as the occupant-addressed, Democratic primary literature that are now bursting the welds on my mail box -- soliciting my ideas on panels they should have.
Touched I was. Deeply.
So I clicked on the link and discovered a very long questionnaire that made it clear that, well, they don't really want my ideas.
"...a neologistic compound of Crowd and a short for Outsourcing, for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions."
-- to organizing panels. Line up panelists. Figure out times. Coordinate troop movements. Calculate the tides. And make sure that each panel has "a Netroots hook", "a range of diversity (ethnicity, gender, age, viewpoints, geography, etc)" and a several other bells, zippers, whistles and childproof caps.
But see, those are not "ideas". That's whatchcall your "event planning": hard, detail-oriented work, which is so many organization pay professionals to do it.
So no thanks.
Instead, here's a counter-offer
Bring me out, put me up in style, and Live-And-In-Person I will interlocute any two of the following driftglass-original-panel-topic guaranteed winners.
"Rent-to-Own Activism": Are we outsourcing our passion?
"Smart Liberals/Foolish Choices": On the flogging of dead horses and the starving of live ones.
"Shut Up and Send Money": How to blog every day until you go anonymously broke.
"Down-wonking Your Policy Casserole": They don't call it "The Power of Myth" for nothing.
"Virtual Protester Beaten by Digital Redneck": If a talking point falls in SecondLife...
Act now!
Operator are standing by!
Supplies are limited!
Now with extra Tom Waits!
Skip the middle man! Don't settle for less! How do we do it? How do we do it? Volume, volume. Turn up the volume.
