Category: Ed Morrissey

The New Media Proletariat

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It is rather a painful thing to acknowledge that Joy McCann is onto something when she remarks about the advent of a two-tiered blogging hierarchy. And it is even more painful to see my friend Jerry Wilson’s expressions of resentment toward Ed Morrissey about this.

In all honesty, despite what anyone may suspect from certain previous writings here (ahem), I recognize Ed as one of the great selfless souls of conservative New Media.

The growth of blogging, including the ascent of certain sites and individuals to pre-eminence within the ecology of the blogosphere, has fundamentally transformed the online environment. People who were still in high school when Bill Quick named the blogosophere (more than a decade ago) now wield more influence and throw more traffic than does Bill Quick himself. Those who have toiled long years as bloggers obviously have reason to resent the upstarts, who may not recognize how they stand on the shoulders of giants. By the same token, newcomers to the ‘sphere understandably resent the difficulty of carving out a readership in an environment where a certain hierarchy has seemingly become already set in stone.

Is some sort of revolutionary movement necessary to unleash the strength and satisfy the ambitions of the New Media Proletariat? Is the existing online hierarchy an engine of systemic injustice?

I think not.

The world is not fair, nor is there ever likely to be any system in human experience that operates as a pure meritocracy. There will always be those whose hard work is ill-compensated and unrecognized, just as there will inevitably be others who benefit extravagantly from what appears to others as undeserved good fortune.

Sic semper hoc.

What is true in the rest of the world and throughout human history is, alas, true in the online world: Life is not fair.

Yet nobody’s participation in this field is compulsory. I could quit this blog tomorrow and go drive a forklift, and probably make more money doing that than I’ve earned in the past year. There is no one in the blogosphere holding a gun to my head, no one with the authority to issue me any commands that I am obliged to obey. My participation is entirely voluntary, as is true of everyone who decides to create a blog and try to make themselves heard above the incessant online din.

Do I have advantages others do not? Indeed I do, and I exploit every one of these advantages to the fullest extent I can.

Do others in online media have advantages over me? Of course, and they will certainly employ those advantages to obtain for themselves the greatest possible personal benefit. It would be foolish for anyone to expect them to do less.

Nevertheless, it remains true that no blog is an island. There is no site with such a decisive advantage of readership or resources that it can neglect the need to grow and expand, to keep pace with the evolution of the online information system. Even within the seemingly rock-solid “Establishment” hierarchy of the blogosphere, there are still opportunities for those who are willing to embrace the challenges, to think of themselves not as oppressed toilers, but as innovative entrepreneurs.

Hear me, my virtual comrades!

You are not being oppressed by the Blogospheric Bourgeoisie.

There is no “Man” holding you down, no Tsar or imperial bureaucracy impeding your advancement. If you are not being linked, if your e-mails go unanswered, if you are banned or attacked or excluded, let those setbacks inspire you to still greater efforts, to new ideas and new enterprises.

If you feel yourself chained to your laptop, the chains that enslave you are forged by your own mind. You can quit tomorrow, walk away for as long as it suits your fancy, and begin again anew whenever, wherever and however you decide.

You may never be “equal,” my comrades, but never doubt that you are always equally free. And perhaps, indeed, the lowly and neglected among us have far greater liberty than do those who, by merit or mere luck, have succeeded in obtaining an income on which they are dependent, so that they are compelled daily to strive for new successes, to crank out the content like so many factory workers manning an industrial assembly line.

Comrades! I beseech you: Consider for yourself what value you add to whatever cause it is you seek to advance, and ask whether the success of that cause is an end greater than your own personal benefit. Your labors and your sufferings — real or imagined — can only be justified by one or the other, and it doesn’t matter which it is.

If it is your goal to be a New Media professional, you should seek the maximum compensation for your skill. If it is your goal to be a volunteer activist online, you have no measure of your success other than the advancement of whatever cause you embrace. It is certainly true that the larger your readership, the greater your impact either way. Yet it is incumbent upon you to expand your own readership, rather than to think of others as obligated to share their readership with you.

A blogospheric Welfare State can no more be the goal of online friends of liberty than would we wish an Internet dictatorship that would allot online traffic according to some egalitarian formula. Blogospheric free enterprise may not produce “social justice” in the virtual environment, but whatever it produces — for good or for ill — a capitalistic New Media will triumph over any other online equivalent of a planned economy that “experts” could invent or imagine.

Comrades of the New Media Proletariat: YOU ARE FREE!
Go forth and prove yourselves worthy of your freedom.

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UPDATE: Newt’s Populist Turn

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FORT MYERS, Fla.
6:51 p.m. ET: During his speech today at Page Field, Newt Gingrich spun a conspiratorial view of the opposition to him, saying that Mitt Romney’s campaign is using “recycled” bailout money to attack him.

Saying that Goldman Sachs chose Barack Obama in 2008, Gingrich said the giant Wall Street bank — using taxpayer funds from bailouts — had “recycled” that money into support for Mitt Romney’s campaign. Gingrich said that, if elected president, he would request “a thorough audit” to find out “where the money went.”

Gingrich also referenced remarks by international financier George Soros critical of his campaign. Soros, Gingrich said, was “in Europe, and he’s explaining to Europeans the American campaign … And so Soros says, you know, we think either Obama or Romney’s fine, but Gingrich, he would change things.” Gingrich said, “They are uncomfortable with me and they should be.”

I’m sitting here comparing notes with Jeff Briscoe from Port Charlotte, whose site is Report Bucket. Neither of us seems to have the Goldman Sachs conspiracy remarks on video — I switched between photo and video mode during the speech — but during the speech, I provided an open phone link for Pete Da Tech Guy who transcribed much of it live, and he provides these direct quotes: “Goldman Sacks is very uncomfortable with me. . . . Those ads are your money recycled to attack me.”

Gingrich described his campaign as one of “grassroots populist conservatism” versus “The Establishment.” He cited the fact that Herman Cain appeared with him today here and elsehwere on the campaign trail, and also that Todd Palin has agreed to record a message of support for automated get-out-the-vote phone calls.

* * * PREVIOUSLY (2:40 p.m. ET) * * *

Sitting here at a McDonald’s on Colonial Boulevard a half-mile from Page Field, where Newt Gingrich and Michael Reagan will hold a “grassroots rally” at 3 p.m. I’m not expecting much of a crowd for a mid-afternoon event on a Monday, but maybe I’ll be surprised. There were already three TV satellite trucks at the site when I cruised by about 1:3o p.m., and there were lots of cops preparing for a heavy security presence.

Listening to Rush Limbaugh on the way up here from Naples, the commercial breaks were pretty much wall-to-wall attack ads, Mitt vs. Newt and Newt vs. Mitt. It seemed as if the anti-Newt ads were the majority. Ed Morrissey has audio of Limbaugh telling Newt to stop complaining about Mitt’s attacks.

It’s been a bad week for Newt and I frankly don’t believe the Insider Advantage poll showing Newt within five. If you look at the Real Clear Politics average, there are five other Florida polls in the past five days showing Mitt winning by anywhere from 11 to 20 points. The latest Quinnipiac poll, with Romney up by 14 points, is about average. So if Romney wins by less than 10, it would be surprising.

Somebody in the Newt camp tossed an “internal memo” over the fence to Matt Lewis. Long story short, they’re lowering expectations in Florida. And as I pointed out in my American Spectator column, second place in Florida is worthless — it’s winner-take-all. Team Gingrich just blew through about $2 million for nothing.

Well, it’s past 2:30 now, so I’d better get over to the airport. Let’s hope the Gingrich people don’t sic the cops on me.

UPDATE: It’s nearly 4 p.m. and no Newt yet. There are about 250-300 people here and four network satellite trucks. I talked to one network reporter who told me about the war between the press corps and the Gingrich campaign over charter travel:

The Gingrich campaign isn’t taking reporters on their charter flight on Monday to travel from Pensacola to Miami with stops along the way, destinations that are physically impossible to get to by car in a day.
The reason?
Campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond says he’s ticked off after several media outlets opted not to get on a charter Saturday night.
“I have better things to do than complain with you guys about the cost of flights,” Hammond said when asked why the Monday charter was canceled.
The campaign is also not taking press with them to Nevada on Tuesday night after the Florida primary after initially saying they would be included.

Read the whole thing. It seems that the networks thought the charter rates they were being charged by the Gingrich campaign were too high. So there’s a little inside-baseball camapign stuff for you.

Mixed Signals from Sarah Palin Produce Pure Frustration for the Political Press

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Sarah Palin poses for a photo with supporters at the Iowa State Fair, Aug. 12.

This morning Smitty taunted me via Twitter with a link to Ed Morrissey’s post Monday about the will-she-or-won’t-she question: What’s up with this Sept. 3 Tea Party rally in Indianola, Iowa? Ed makes a good point:

Politicians don’t win the Iowa caucus with showy, one-off events.  They have to conduct the retail politicking that the declared candidates are currently conducting all across the state.  That means going to small events as well as large ones, traveling through all of the small towns and shaking hands, and asking voters now to caucus for them in 2012.

Exactly: Let us stipulate that any event with Sarah Palin would be “large” by comparison with, say, the 50 or so voters who showed up for Rick Santorum’s barn party. Still, the fact remains that Iowa caucus-goers prefer to vote for candidates they’ve met face-to-face, and the winner will likely have shaken 50,000 hands by Feb. 6. As Ed says, “Palin would need to win Iowa to have a path to the nomination,” and if she’s going to win it, she’ll have to get busy pretty soon to catch up with the handshaking that’s already been done by her rivals.

Time’s a-wastin’, in other words. Continue reading Mixed Signals from Sarah Palin Produce Pure Frustration for the Political Press →

CPAC Day 2: Into the Scrum

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Rep. Michelle Bachmann was surrounded by autograph-seeking admirers Friday afternoon in the lobby of the Wardman Park Marriott in one of those spontaneous scrums that occur when GOP celebrities show up at the Conservative Political Action Conference. 

There is an interesting story behind how I ended up in the midst of the Bachmann scrum. About noon, I got a call from a young woman who introduced herself as Kathleen McCaffrey, a Cornell University student who is also a co-blogger at Professor William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection. Professor Jacobson had told me that his associate would be attending CPAC and so, when she called, I arranged to meet her in the hotel lobby.

When we met in the lobby — “Look for the man in the brown hat” — Miss McCaffrey was accompanied by her friend, Michele Walk, associate editor of The Politicizer, a student-oriented conservative site. “Come to my office,” I said, directing them to the smoking area outside the hotel that functions as my HQ at CPAC. We had been out there about two minutes when we were joined by Ladd Ehlinger Jr., who employed his photographic skills to commemorate the meeting.

Now, it happened that Miss Walk is a student at George Washington University. As soon as she told me that, I said, “Do you know Sergio?” GWU alumnus Sergio Gor is a rising young operative I’ve known since 2007, who now works for — can you guess? Continue reading CPAC Day 2: Into the Scrum →

Professor on Aborted Babies: ‘I Look at Them Unflinchingly and See Meat’

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“I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies. You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.”
— Paul Z. Myers, University of Minnesota biology professor

UPDATE: Linked by Sister Toldjah — thanks! — and by Doug at Daley Gator, who sees “moral retardation” at work. Both relate this to the heinous case of Kermit Gosnell and, as further proof of his fanatical blindness, Professor Myers declared of the “house of horrors” in Philadelphia: “This is not about abortion.”

Ed Morrissey reports that Gosnell has been denied bail, and calls to our attention Michelle Malkin’s column explaining how the politics of “choice” made the Philadelphia horror possible:

[T]he grand jury itself pointed out that loosened oversight of abortion clinics enacted under pro-choice former GOP governor Tom Ridge enabled Gosnell’s criminal enterprise – and led to the heartless execution of hundreds of babies. Mass murder got a pass in the name of expanding “access” and appeasing abortion lobbyists. As the report made clear: “With the change of administration from [pro-life Democrat] Governor Casey to Governor Ridge,” government health officials “concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”

Read the rest of that. As for Professor Myers and other academic propagandists of the Culture of Death, I remind you of Abraham Lincoln’s remark that “the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” And godlessness has been the official philosophy of American schools for more than one generation.

UPDATE II: Vox Day:

This is the naked face of atheism, ladies and gentlemen. Look on it well and remember it, because it usually doesn’t dare to show its disgusting and anti-human nature so openly.

Maybe you want to read the extremely graphic Philadelphia grand jury report on Gosnell’s house of horrors. Or maybe it will suffice to see the jars of baby feet kept in the abortionist’s clinic.

Today is, after all, “Ask Them What They Mean by ‘Choice’ Day.” And there is a Memeorandum thread.

NY-23: Hoffman Is Back.
Opposition Seized By Dismay.

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by Smitty

Having met the gentleman at CPAC, it is a pleasure to point to Robert Stacy McCain’s article on Doug Hoffman over at The Washington Times.

Mr. Hoffman’s Conservative Party campaign last fall became a nationwide crusade after party leaders backed state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, whose liberal record angered conservatives bloggers, such as Erick Erickson and Michelle Malkin. Republican 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and the Club For Growth were among those who endorsed Mr. Hoffman.
As polls showed a Hoffman surge in the final weeks of the race, Mrs. Scozzafava quit the campaign and shocked Republicans by endorsing Mr. Owens, who won with a 48 percent plurality.
Mr. Hoffman’s supporters immediately began urging him to run again, with House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence praising his “brilliant” campaign.
Mr. Hoffman has reassembled most of his 2009 campaign team, including Mr. McLaughlin’s polling firm and TV advertising specialist Nelson Warfield, and begins with more than $200,000 in campaign cash remaining from last year.
Mr. Hoffman used his Facebook online network to announce his 2010 candidacy to supporters Monday night.

Read the whole thing

Ed Morrissey also offered analysis at Hot Air, along with a CPAC interview clip:

Circumstances should favor Hoffman this time. In the previous contest, a special election to fill John McHugh’s seat, the state didn’t allow for a primary contest, throwing the nominations to the county chairs of both parties. Democrats chose Bill Owen, while Republicans passed over Hoffman to select DeDe Scozzafava. Hoffman ran as a third-party candidate instead, winning over Tea Party enthusiasts while Scozzafava campaigned poorly and alienated voters in her district. Hoffman came within a couple of percentage points of winning the whole race.

More at the Memorandum River.

This blog predicts that Hoffman’s straightforward honesty will go over in the 112th Congress like a musician at a rap concert.  Clearly we need to send more musicians like Doug to DC.

UPDATE (RSM): Speaking being “seized by dismay,” I’d like to know which anonymous worm was responsible for this vicious lie.

CPAC 2010: Bloggerazzi Photopalooza!

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“It’s all a blur,” Andrew Breitbart said to me in a phone conversation Monday, as we discussed events at CPAC 2010 — the biggest ever and, most attendees agreed, the best. The “blur” effect that Breitbart described is much like the experience of campaign coverage — you go, go, go day after day, with maybe four hours sleep night after night. Between the sleep deprivation and meeting so many people, you lose track of exactly who is who and what happened when.

When CPAC is over, you go through your pockets and find business cards for people you obviously must have met but whose names don’t match up with a face in your fatigue-scorched memory. And when you return to CPAC next year, you’ll be walking through the hotel and pass someone who looks vaguely familiar. You’ll say, “Hey, I know you.” And the other person will say, “Yeah, I think so, but I can’t remember where we met.”

That conversation will continue until either:

  • A. Your memories click and you recall which event you met at the previous year, or
  • B. You give up, admitting that you both were probably too drunk at the time to remember.

This is why it’s important to keep a camera in your pocket at all times during CPAC. My little pink Kodak digital — the famous “Barbie Cam” — captures those faces I might otherwise forget and those incredible scenes that no one would believe were it not for the photographic record. So brace yourself and get ready to be amazed. Continue reading CPAC 2010: Bloggerazzi Photopalooza! →