"Activist outlets in the Dear Leader era..."

Two recent threads on Corrente deserve some attention.

The first concerns our old buddy Davey Sirota, who once accused me of "hate stalking" him, although I've yet to receive a restraining order. He will no long blog on a daily basis -- and although I did not stalk or even read him on a daily basis, I am nevertheless sad to see him go.

I say this even though Davey has expectorated much hatred toward All Things Clinton, and even though Davey once suggested that Obama's biggest problem is "Clintonism," and even though Davey once gushed about being invited to spend a day with the Lightbringer Himself. In recent months, Davey has segued into a more realistic assessment of He, Glorious He. Take note of this passage:

The reason for this change is fairly simple: I'm in need of something more creative, and I want to get back to the basics of writing. It is my passion, it is what I love - and I am interested in more than just the hard-core political world, whose media (blogospheric/magazines/TV shows/etc.) and activist outlets in the Dear Leader Era I believe are becoming less and less creative, more and more sycophantic, and ultimately, completely unstimulating.

I say that with an asterisk, though - and that asterisk is In These Times and OpenLeft. Those are two of the few places where I think generally creative and bold-thinking writing is still being done - by journalists, front-pagers, diarists and commenters.

Now, I can't fully go along with the sentiments here. Daily Kos, HuffPo and TPM readers have shown remarkable creativity when it comes to thinking up new reasons to hate the Clintons. And have you read their strained rationalizations for Obama's right-wing stances -- you know, all that stuff about 11th dimensional chess? Talk about creative! Such displays of imagination take us straight into the territory staked out by Lewis Carroll, Salvador Dali and the Comte de Lautréamont.

Still, the key phrases here are "activist outlets in the Dear Leader Era" and "sycophantic." Yep, that sure describes the current left-wing blogosphere.

So I wish Davey well on his screenplay or novel or garage band or whatever it is that has captured his attention. But I'm saddened to see that a former O-Borg unit has decided to stop blogging so soon after regaining some semblance of humanity.

Corrente's snarky take on Davey's move contains a link to this thread on the progblogs. One comenter offered these words

The fastest way to kill a revolution is to subsidize it. That's all that happened here. Obama's campaign took over the blogs, subsidized them, and now they are unable to critique him because of the amount of advertising dollars (and who knows what else) he pumped into their coffers.

I've never seen any proof for the claim that Obama's campaign directly pumped dollars into the Kos, Marshall or Arianna bank accounts. As the same writer notes:

I believe it, based on the shape of discourse (and Axelrod's day job) but I've never seen hard evidence.

We can state, without much fear of contradiction, that those "Dear Leader" websites received many advertising dollars from the Obama campaign. Just as a newspaper will hesitate to criticize a department store whose ads keep the journal alive, Moulitsas and Marshall had excellent financial motive not to mention Obama's NAFTA lie or his outrageous claim that he barely knew Tony Rezko.

The Corrente thread goes on to discuss the allegation that there were, during campaign 2008, "suspicious patterns" in the IP addresses of the most vociferous Hillary-haters. I'm the one -- though not the only one -- who made that allegation. Forgive the self-citation:

Because I dared to write such heterodoxy -- because I dared to suggest that a black politician might be as duplicitous as any white politician -- arrogant "progressives" routinely hurled accusations of racism and even Nazism. Their whole-body hate-gasms made the Freepers and the dittoheads seem like blissed-out flower children.

We're not talking about once-a-day attacks. We're talking about once an hour. At times, they came every few minutes.

These attacks were, for the most part, pure abuse; few comments engaged the specifics of any given argument. I received five or six rather serious-sounding death threats, and discussed two or three of them online. (Contacting the authorities proved irritating and fruitless.)

I began to check the IP numbers of these hourly attack messages. Quite a few of them originated from a certain computer in Chicago. Those messages -- "drive-bys," some would call them -- seemed to come from folks who had no previous knowledge of or interest in my writings.

Every so often, someone using that same IP number would try to palm off a hoax. For example, one anti-Hillary letter allegedly came from the mother of a soldier in Iraq. I didn't publish it, but other bloggers did. It was proven to be a fake.

I still don't understand what those hate stalkers (and in this case, the term is quite justified) had hoped to accomplish. Does anyone really think that it is possible to convert through insult?