The Daily Brew - January 9, 2004

[demnan]

Printed in its entirety with permission from the author.


The Daily Brew
© January 9, 2004
No Longer A Cool Kid

As some of you know, I started this little page long before most of today's popular bloggers. More than a year before the 2000 election, I was getting 8,000 hits a day. Of course, that was back in the days before Media Whores Online took to the internet, before anyone had ever heard of Atrios, Kos, or Tbogg; and well before the Democratic Underground ever published a single headline. It was easy getting people to read my stuff then. There simply weren't that many alternatives.

The lack of anything except the corporate anti-Clinton spin machine was, of course, the main reason I started writing this page. But despite my "first mover" advantage, all of these fine sites have long since left me in the dust. Which is actually fine by me. Since I have more fun reading other people's work than writing my own, I have happily become an infrequent, if somewhat less widely read, commentator. I no longer check, or even keep, statistics on the site, but I doubt I get even 8 hits per day any more. Still, I have to wonder how I could have squandered my early lead so thoroughly.

The obvious answers are somehow unsatisfactory. Sure, my writing is third rate, while the competition is top notch. And while real sites crank out commentary on an hourly basis, my updates are few and far
between. The only thing "daily" about "the brew" is its name. But I
can't accept the idea that putting out poorly written trash on a
sporadic schedule isn't enough to win legions of fans. Happily, David
Brooks of the New York Times has given me a better explanation. See, I am a "conspiracy theorist" and therefore unacceptable in polite company.

Since the attacks of 9/11, I have argued off and on that this event, the defining moment of Bush's tenure in the White House, was also Bush's electoral Achilles heel. I brazenly suggested that Democrats should confront Bush on the failures that led to that fateful day. As the months turned to years, and it became increasingly obvious that this wasn't going to happen, like the rest of the media, I admit I more or less moved my focus to the Iraq war. After all, it was the next great national security blunder of the Bush administration, and attacking Bush on Iraq had become a fairly accepted practice. So, with American soldiers dying in an effort to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that never existed, I resigned myself to the fact that the leaders of the Democratic Party were either incapable or unwilling to make an issue of September 11, and I had become a pariah for ever
suggesting that they do otherwise.

The fact that the Bush administration was warned about the 9/11 attacks by multiple sources, that prior to the attacks the Bush administration took numerous actions that made them more likely, that the attacks were almost certainly preventable, and that the people who failed to prevent them are still employed in the same jobs by the Bush administration, and the fact that the administration has done everything in its power to hide all of this from the American public, was apparently not something that could sway public opinion. Or, apparently, so thought
people who are far more influential than I.

More popular internet pundits, the kind who are invited to chatrooms with Wesley Clark, or who get mentioned by people like Howard Kurtz on the cable TV or in the corporate press, understand that the mere suggestion that Bush all but invited the 9/11 attacks puts you in a media imposed "sanity quarantine." So, while many are willing to point out that Bush lied repeatedly to justify his invasion of Iraq, few are willing to pick at the scab of the event that gave him the cover to make those lies in the first place.

Instead, as Brooks and the "liberal" New York Times would suggest, anyone who dares to say that Bush should bear responsibility for the September 11 attacks (and the gall to carry it one step further and consider the various motivations that might have led to the catastrophic policies that allowed it to happen), thinks they are getting messages through the fillings in their teeth. This view is so pervasive in the corporate media, and consequently in the public mind, that liberal bloggers, with their "amazon.com links" and "paypal donation accounts" won't even discuss it. Since I won't let it go,
they get 80,000 hits a day and I don't.

I confess that I feel somewhat vindicated now that the Republican chairman of the commission investigating the attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, and that the people in the Bush administration who let it happen should have been fired long ago, and that the Bush administration is still dragging its feet on providing information for the investigation. But it really doesn't matter. Judging from the non-reaction in the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and more depressingly, the left wing blogosphere, he is just another loony conspiracy theorist
like me.

That's life I guess. Move along people. Nothing to see here.

[tom_paine]

1. The New Political Korrectness of Imperial Amerika

That's what Brew is describing here.

And it is infinitely more dangerous than the old Political Correctness, which also sucked.