Heh. Karl Rove made an ass of himself yesterday in Washington, pretending to talk intelligently about the blogosphere.
He apparently maundered on, in predictable fashion, about teh anonymity, which in itself, as DBJ observes in his Kos diary, is very funny:
Karl Rove is angry that the internet is a place where people can post anonymously. He feels it hurts our democracy to have people say things but not put their names to them. The anonymity gives people a way to say things but not take responsibility for them.Yes. Mr. Out-the-CIA-Agent-To-Douchebag-Of-Liberty-Novakula is upset because the internet allows for anonymity.
I was rather more taken by these lines, presumably quoted correctly by the not-always-trustworthy-but-definitely-Rove-friendly Washington Times:
"The Web has given angry and vitriolic people more of a voice in public discourse," said Mr. Rove, who served as one of President Bush's top strategists until he resigned this past summer, and is a noted technology nut."People in the past who have been on the nutty fringe of political life, who were more or less voiceless, have now been given an inexpensive and easily accessible soapbox, a blog," Mr. Rove said during a speech about politics and the Web at the Willard InterContinental, a hotel just blocks from his former place of employment.
"I'm a fan of many blogs. I visit them frequently and I learn a lot from them," Mr. Rove said. "But there also blogs written by angry kooks."
Mr. Rove cited the results of a study that found that writers and commenters on liberal blogs such as DailyKos.com cursed far more than writers and commenters on conservative Web sites such as FreeRepublic.com.
I know, I know -- it hurts to laugh that hard, but bear with me.
Look back at the attitude that a sleek, overfed denizen of the Beltway expresses there towards people who were formerly "voiceless" and their "inexpensive and easily accessible soapboxes." To any serious democrat (and I mean the lower-case d), those should be terms of approbation, not insults. Like, the citizens are piping up, eh? And Karl's response is to cry "The horror! The horror!"
I guess it's not news that we know where to locate Karl Rove on the democracy thermometer (sub-Absolute Cheney). It bothers, though, that so many North Americans are going to be swayed by cheap appeals to the proprieties (you're a good person only if you're well tailored and know which fork to use) as substitutes for republican virtue.
I often have this fantasy, that I could one day have Diderot sitting beside me at the machines and could show him what we are now doing on the net. (I also always take Diderot with me when I go to vote.) Diderot would be turning somersaults and doing handsprings, just over the moon at how things worked out with the democracy/universal education caper ... And then of course I'd have to fill him in on the downside ... (I do that after we vote, too.)
Karl Rove -- and his emulators in Canada, of which I fear there are already too many in influential places -- is a measure of just how seriously C21 North Americans have failed what should have been ours, the inheritance of the Enlightenment. Sleazy brutes are running the show. We can't let them win. Sleazy brutes make Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau cry. We have to fight back.
h/t to emptywheel at The Next Hurrah
"The Web has given angry and vitriolic people more of a voice in public discourse,"
Karl Rove has given more people reasons to be angry and vitriolic in public discourse.
Not to mention the earlier anonymous bloggers, like Publius.
Anyway, I think "inexpensive" is the key word here. Public discourse is qualitatively different now that you no longer need to own a printing press to have your voice heard.
Rove seems to think it's worse. But the stuff we're able to read now is orders of magnitude better than when we were limited to a daily dose the Southam chain's offerings. And I think it's making people smarter, which is what Rove is really afraid of.
Can't talk...still tittering at "sub-Absolute-Cheney" :)
Of all the GD, effin' noive! Doodly!
Poor Karl. Of course he doesn't like blogging. Can't control the message and there's no money in it for him. At least with his attempt at a music career (Rappin' Rove),he had a dark horse shot as a novelty act.
Now, now, it was only a minor grammatical error, a thinko, if you will. Rather than "*but there are also* blogs written by angry kooks", what Mr. Rove meant to say was "*those are of course* blogs written by . . . " or something along those lines.
He was explaining how useful blogs are in supplying him with angry, kooky material. When you spend as much time inventing different realities as Mr. Rove does, it's understandable if you accidentally get things a bit reversed sometimes when you're talking.
Never did trust those pseudonymous agitators and their rabble-rousing Federalist papers. Wholly untrustworthy without a real John Hancock, if you ask me.
Re: Rove and blogger civility, Amanda @ ThinkProgress does the 'pot, meet kettle' thing here.
(My personal favourite example of Rove's infamous 'civility' comes by way of Atrios: “We will f*ck him. Do you hear me? We will f*ck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f*cked him!”)
I'm with Carter above.
It is the lowering of the bar and the increased access that folks like Mr. Rove and his ilk fear most.
And, by way of corollary, do not forget that Mr. Rove has demonstrated time and time and time again that he will always do his best to smear those and that which he fears most.
Thus, those Kooks that believe in the things that folks like Diderot had to say, must be doing something very, very right.
.