Speaking of chortles, Josh Marshall has a spot-on analysis of the Bugsy Siegel fainting spell, perhaps brought upon by the smell of potted meat.
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall June 27, 2006 12:35 PM ... You may have heard that a few days ago, in TNR online Lee Siegel called the blogosphere “hard fascism with a Microsoft face.”When I heard about that I figured it was a throwaway line, albeit a bit overdone and self-serious. But no, Siegel's really serious about this. He is in earnest! And on Friday he followed up with a deeper analysis with the weighty title “The Origins of Blogofascism”. There's even the beginnings of a sociological analysis and a historical one too.
...
More generally, I think the blogosphere, in contrast to more staid venues for writing, is something like the much more popular and participatory sort of theater culture you had in the 19th and well into the 20th century (you may remember seeing some hint of this funned up in old Bugs Bunny cartoons) where, if the audience didn't like what they were hearing or seeing, they started booing. Or hooting. Or heck, maybe tossing raw vegetables. You get a sense of [Lee] Siegel's reaction when he grandly opines that the blogosphere, “radiates democracy's dream of full participation but practices democracy's nightmare of populist crudity...”...
Siegel then does a quick character sketch of Markos Moulitsas as one of these “rootless men”, ready, I guess, to congeal in to some sort of html freikorps ...
read it yerself
The ignorance regarding poli sci here still amazes me. I believe Blogland is here to stay, blogs have the freedom to voice whatever they want and Lee Siegal must, perhaps, take poli sci and we'll even let him get lectured at the Algonquin table, what a bourgeois treat!
Tsk, that vulgar Blogosphere. Why can't it be a haven for civilized, measured discourse like the older media, havens of Platonic philosophers like Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter?
right, and don't forget the Vulgar Pigboy, aka Mr. Blue Pill.