Conservative Blogs: Conniving? Or Simply... Right

Day-by-Day Cartoon (a new feature here on KM - see above) notes today that according to the New York Times, conservative blogs are more effective than liberal ones:

Democrats say there's a key difference between liberals and conservatives online. Liberals use the Web to air ideas and vent grievances with one another, often ripping into Democratic leaders. (Hillary Clinton, for instance, is routinely vilified on liberal Web sites for supporting the Iraq war.) Conservatives, by contrast, skillfully use the Web to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates. They are generally less interested in examining every side of every issue and more focused on eliciting strong emotional responses from their supporters.

But what really makes conservatives effective is their pre-existing media infrastructure, composed of local and national talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, the Fox News Channel and sensationalist say-anything outlets like the Drudge Report - all of which are quick to pass on the latest tidbit from the blogosphere. [emphases added]

Tell me they're not joking. Our pre-existing media infrastructure? You mean like CBS and NPR and the New York Times and the LA Times and CNN and pretty much any major news outlet that existed prior to Reagan? Those media outlets and their blogger brethren are just holy and pure and clean and white as the driven snow... "examining every side of every issue". Oh yes, they are nuanced... Deep. Curious. Respectful. Inclusive. Diverse. Thinkers. Like on Bush (evil!), or Iraq (quagmire!) Just don't be Joe Lieberman and go beyond the party line or you'll be shunned.

The rest of us though, are a cabal - taking funding from candidates (it is implied), coordinating closely, digging up muck, and carefully and oh-so-cynically selecting what we choose to write about for maximum political gain. Well, yes... except for the political links and the close coordination and the muck and the cynicism and well... pretty much all of it. Gimme a break.

I do this for free and write about what I want to write about. I'm conservative but I'm not affiliated with a party. The Times overlooks one point that would be devastating to its argument. What makes conservative blogs more effective is that many of us have been Democrats. We've held liberal positions, in some cases fervently. We know the arguments because we once espoused them. We've re-examined those views and found them wanting.

We found our old party drifting, then speeding away from us over a radicalized left wing cliff. I suspect there are fewer current-day liberals who've been in the conservative camp and made the reverse journey. And not having done so, they are less effective at understanding and deconstructing our arguments. Which reduces them to shrieking slogans and frustration at one another: Bushitler! Iraq=Vietnam!

As we age, we conservative bloggers (meeting tonight at the club, boys - remember the secret handshake) have come to believe in a world where some things are not relative and deserving of infinite wrangling ("examining every side of every issue"). Some things are simply right and wrong. I know that's out of style in these days of cultural relativism grading into personal relativism grading into personal nihilism. But that's our secret weapon. We believe that some moral absolutes exist out there.

We have confidence in those absolutes precisely because we did not create them. Because they are not new - developed and polished and refined as they were over generations. From time to time, some of them (male-only suffrage, segregation and slavery come to mind as obvious blots on the conservative position), are shown to be inconsistent with more enduring values. E.g., in opposition to "All men are created equal". But those instances are the exceptions that prove the rule. (Side note: consider which party was in office when those things were fixed.)

No, we are more effective because we've held the positions of our opponents in our youth and we're tapped into the refined wisdom of generations. That makes this easy. No secret cabal. No longstanding media infrastructure. Most of us are doing this for free with one arm tied behind our backs. And at some level, that's gotta scare the crap outta the liberal echo chamber that the New York Times has become.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has a thorough take-down here.

[Michael] Crowley's embarrassing little squib (283 words) has to be one of most insipid, shallow, and uninformed wastes of space to grace the NYTimes' pages. Based on a single "expert" source--"liberal activist Matt Stoller"--Crowley makes sweeping assertions about the content, nature, effectiveness, and media penetration of partisan blogs.