Monday, February 19, 2007

Andrea Marcotte Makes Some Points

Blogging populism and the political establishment | TPMCafe

Read the entry at the link above and see for yourself how this woman thinks and writes and why so many of us love and respect her for it.

In the mainstream media right now, politics is a long, drawn-outgame of "gotcha", and the result is that everyone who wants to be in politics is scared to ever say anything interesting or thoughtful for fear that it will be taken out of context and used relentlessly to discredit them. The result is that ordinary people are routinely turned off to politics, to the point where getting more than half of registered voters to vote in any one election is considered some sort of amazing victory.

This is where blogs step in, at least on the left. Blogging is a real counterpoint to the thoughtless, elitist, soundbite-driven mainstream media, where we're supposed to absorb an endless stream of soundbites and photo ops and our participation is limited mostly to a vote every couple of years. Blogs are bringing back the 19th century debate culture, where people would attend real debates and political rallies and listen to speeches for hours at a time. The irony about the vulgar people is that the vulgar people crave analysis, debate and participation, because these things validate our intelligence and our right to be citizens. The blogs are still appealing only to a small segment of society right now, but they're still relatively new and have the potential to reach a much larger audience over time.


She nails both the MSM for its complicity in the current state of politics and blogging on the left for attempting reparation of the same. Of couse, this is exactly why the MSM wants to squelch the bloggers and why they cooperated with the wingnuts in presenting a skewed story that really had nothing at all to do with bigotry or religion and everything to do with power and politics.

Good on you, Andrea. Keep up the good fight!

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