ArchPundit

Harkening back to the good old days of the great delink wars of 2002, TNR decided to suggest Kos is somehow controlling the blogosphere.

Because herding cats is so much fun.

I’m not on Townhouse so I can’t shed much light on all of this other than to say that coordinating message amongst activists is nothing new and is one of the true weaknesses Democratic activists have.

For those who don’t understand Markos’ reaction, essentially TNR is attacking him for offering a suggestion as to how to coordinate that message and found the Advertising Liberally as some sort of leverage he exerts. The problem with that is some of the Members of Advertising Liberally can’t stand Markos and go out of their way to tweak him fairly often.

More to the point, it’s not so bad that TNR takes on Markos for his message, it’s the assanine attack that he, by coordinating message with other activist journalists, is influencing content through financial control.

Zengerle’s bullshit line is here in a later post

From these e-mails, it appears there was a good amount of concern among liberal bloggers about the Armstrong SEC story and the allegations of “pay for play” against Kos and Armstrong, and some of these bloggers wanted to address these issues forthrightly. And, yet, after Kos subsequently wrote the e-mail quoted in my original post asking the bloggers to “ignore” the story in order to “starve of it oxygen,” there was virtual silence in the liberal blogosphere about it. That, to me at least, suggests that Kos does indeed have a good deal of influence over what other liberal bloggers write.

Or perhaps because it didn’t become a big issue on the blogs, and it’s only a side issue even now. Who goes out of their way to report on a problem with a friend or ally? Sometimes, but it isn’t that frequent. Given not much information is known about the subject, it’s kind of hard to write much about it. Either the non-partisan press or the opposition makes it an issue and barring a big blogburst on the subject why would someone on Townhouse write about it? Assuming malice when the more likely answer is there was no reason to highlight Jerome’s problem is silly.

I know that in discussions regarding Advertising Liberally, when Chris Bowers set out some basic network standards, there were a couple bloggers who had grand conspiracy claims about what Jerome, Chris, and Markos were doing (Chris did it, Markos just argued for the changes). It was silly. This is the same thing.

Markos’ response goes a bit off the rails because he is talking primarily to people who understand the entire context and the frustration with TNR over it trying to tear apart burgeoning infrastructure with this kind of crap. It’s not that TNR criticizes the ideas coming out of the blogosphere, it’s that it attempts silly ad hominen attacks. In one sense, everyone is talking past one another, but I’ll put most of the blame on TNR for not even trying to understand the language.

I’m going back to my rolling waves of nausea, but I was a bit annoyed reading all of this.