If We Make it Through November

The Bush variant is obviously “If we can only make it through November” i.e. keep the factual, legal, and political roof from falling in until after the election. The latest ploy is Republican congressional leadership’s generous offer to shepherd the new “independent” WMD investigation safely into next year’s political limbo, where it can keep its orphaned buddy, the blatantly stonewalled 9/11 inquiry, company.

Per this strategy, after Bush scrapes his way back into the White House and the Republicans resume their unquestioned sway over the Congress, energized and confident conservatives can put the kibosh on the various investigative commissions; demoralized peaceniks will slink back to their holes; and the American people can “move on” to the next way station to of our national trip to moral and social oblivion.

Don’t want that to happen, do we?

What can the blogosphere do?

Plenty.

Thanks to the efforts of thousands of caring and committed progressives, the blogosphere has emerged as a safe, clean, well-lighted place where thinking Democrats can gather for information and views and not have their beliefs or intelligence insulted.

But there’s more.

The blogosphere recently received Big Media’s backhanded validation when Peter Jennings used the New Hampshire candidates’ debate to frame a question to Wesley Clark that sought to discredit both Internet celebrity Michael Moore and one of the blogosphere’s favorite and most-effective anti-Bush crotchets — the 1972-73 gap in Dubya’s Texas Air National Guard service record:

Clark’s stammering response probably had Michael Moore wishing for a few moments that he had his ham sandwich — his generic support for an un-named anti-Bush candidate — back:

It was a sobering reminder that, although we may have George W. Bush on the ropes in cyberspace, in “meat space” (as William Gibson memorably described reality) we have a long way to go before we can drive the media and perceptual agenda — or make our political puppets dance — as effectively as Big Media and Big Money do.

And the messy implosion of the Internet’s favored candidate — Howard Dean — demonstrated that the white-hot emotions and advocacy of the Internet are unfamiliar and perhaps unsettling even to our own intended constituency of thinking and caring Democrats.

But here’s the silver lining.

As Stirling Newberry pointed out, only 10% of primary voters in New Hampshire had their news, opinions, and agendas shaped by the Internet. Based on their preferences and priorities, Dean would have run in a dead heat with Kerry if 30% of voters had been web-surfing blog-addicts.

I’m not necessarily carrying a brief, or shedding tears, for Dean. I’m pointing out that the Internet can make a difference. All we need is for more people to turn to it. Maybe not everybody. But enough people to make a difference.

Again, the mini-tempest with Jennings understandably didn’t do anything good for Clark. But it reawakened that bloodsucking ghoul Where Was George, who stalks our beloved Commander in Chief and threatens to drain the patriotic gore from his quaking flesh To the White House’s dismay, the monster not only reappeared on the Internet, where Michael Moore’s site received millions of hits. It resurfaced in the mainstream press. And in Kerry’s campaign.

The blogosphere is perfectly suited to opposing George W. Bush. You could say, maybe Al Gore invented the Internet, but George W. Bush created the blogosphere.

The Bush administration has created an empire of lies. Teasing out the truth from inside the lies and broadcasting it over the Internet has become the mission not only of hundreds, maybe thousands, of bloggers and websites. Now that we have three years of publicly documented untruths, mis-statements, and wishful thinking presented as diamond-hard realism to work with, debunking Bush is as easy as hitting a ball off a tee.

The blogosphere is now important, legitimate, and probably irreplaceable.

When Josh Marshall can take time out from breakfast to switch on his wireless modem, do a quick web search, demolish the latest piece of pro-Administration cant by Jim Hoagland, and broadcast it to the entire planet within a few minutes, he is performing a valuable public service, in a timely fashion, and for free.

How’s that for a value proposition?

The blogosphere does the job because the conventional media can’t — or won’t.

It has emerged as an alternative to the pre-packaged pap served out by the conventional media outlets. For whatever reason — venality, co-option, or an unwillingness to risk the prestige of their mastheads and the value of their precious brands by actually going out on a limb and calling a spade a spade — Big Media is only supplying half the story: the insignificant, glossy, misleading, feel-good half.

I’m tempted to think that the natural audience for Big Media is a shrinking demographic of anxious stockholders, suspicious elites, and paranoid big corporation employees who look to the Evening News for validation of circumstances and lifestyles that are becoming obsolete.

That includes NPR, the broadcast Starbucks of choice for affluent liberals, whose ombudsman was forced to confess:

“Blogs are, as I now appreciate, as legitimate a method of communicating information and opinion as traditional media. I was wrong to suggest that much of political blogging is "astroturfing" … Indeed, a recent Pew poll points out that an increasing number of Americans are getting their information from non-traditional sources. That fact has now been made abundantly clear to me.

You were right. I was wrong.”

Duh.

Maybe Big Media’s Info-tainment and Info-ganda operations reassure the upper income bracket that everything is just OK, but their slick, frantic efforts look more and more irrelevant to the rest of us. Meanwhile, the Internet and the blogosphere are busy filling the hole in American discourse that George Bush made and the conventional media outlets ignore

Thankfully, the American people have begun to notice.

If we want the Internet to be a decisive force in the upcoming elections, all we need to do is get more people to use it.

I’m almost in favor of running a public service ad, “Look What The Internet Can Do For You”.

Failing that, we have to get the rest of the world — our family, friends, co-workers, the Democratic Party and its candidates — to accept the Internet as the most effective and empowering source of news, opinions, and validation.

If blogosphere readership and blog-inspired activism reach a critical mass — or start showing a growth curve that the MBA quants who run TV stations and newspapers can understand — then Big Media, in order to affirm its own legitimacy and eminence, will have to devote its energy to quashing blog-driven stories instead of spiking them.

When that happens, most of the work is done. Big Media will do its usual dreadful job of pseudo-reportage, slanted stenography, and analysis by innuendo, thereby driving more people to the Internet to get the full, true story of what’s going on.

By trying to discredit the blogosphere, the conventional media will make more and more people discover it…and believe it.

Then, perhaps we can not only demand independent commissions on 9/11 and WMDs and Valerie Plame, we can effectively demand that they produce their reports before the presidential election as a matter of vital national importance and interest.

Then, maybe, the Bush team will start singing, “If we can make it to November…”