I AGREE WITH ATRIOS...

Matt Bai really is a wanker. Joan Walsh takes Bai to task for writing another book that parrots the talk radio gasbags; specifically, the Democrats have a "disabling hatred" toward Pres. Fredo. In wingnut circles, this is known as Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) and is often used to denigrate critics of the numerous failures of the criminal Bush regime. I've heard a few of the wingnuts (Brian & The Judge, Hannity, Slots Bennett) add a twist to this by accusing the Democrats of blaming everything on Fredo. In his book, Bai seems to have internalized the Noise Machine's deflection of Fredo criticism.

By simply quoting him, Walsh points out that Bai is as hostile to liberal bloggers as almost any wingnut:

"They were, in fact, the voices of the new public square, but it was more like the Parisian public square in the days of the Bastille -- not a place where townspeople came to carefully consider what their leaders had to say, but where the mob gathered to make demands and mete out its own kind of justice."

This hostility leads Bai to misunderstand what Ned Lamont's challenge to Holy Joe Lieberman was all about. In Bai's wingnut mind, the bloggers supported Lamont because they love power and feed on hatred. Walsh correctly notes that:

Throughout the book, he minimizes what the Iraq war means to bloggers, to Democrats, to the vast majority of American voters, to the world, in order to depict Democratic insurgents as power-mad kingmakers or simply haters.

[snip]

The dishonest marketing of the Iraq war and the treacherous lies behind it, the cavalier way it was executed, the disastrous way it unfolded, along with some Democrats' collusion in all or part of the debacle, have shaped and will shape American political culture for years to come. And it happened because the so-called vast right-wing conspiracy, the intellectual and media infrastructure Rob Stein charted, had succeeded in a decades-long campaign to smear Democrats as un-American in every imaginable way -- and very specifically, after 9/11, as terrorist sympathizers and appeasers. Most disturbing to angry party insurgents, Democrats like Joe Lieberman helped them along, not only by supporting the Iraq war through today, but by going on right-wing Fox News and the Wall Street Journal wingnut editorial page attacking Democrats in exactly the same terms Republicans used.

Walsh gives us a bonus goodie: a link to an opinion piece that reminds again what a lying, sociopathic whore Tony Snow really is underneath the glib facade.