Neo Nothing

Digby wraps up the whole Libby affair with this piquant indictment of the Washington press corps. He gets to the heart of the matter, which as I mentioned earlier really is the clubby incestuous relationship between the Russerts and the Libbys, rather than some high principled first amendment argument. He says:

We watched the press behave like a bunch of lapdancers for the Republicans for well over a decade. They wrapped their legs around Republican power so strongly that it finally led us into a circumstance that is killing people in large numbers. They were angry at Bill Clinton for "trashing the place" and it wasn't his place. They took out their childish pique on Al Gore and stoked the fires that demanded Bush be seated in the white house no matter what the legitimate outcome of the election in 2000. After 9/11 they put on a modern martial pageant that would have made Joseph Stalin proud.

They can weep and moan all they want about the verdict and help the Republicans twist themselves into a pretzels trying to explain why lying about the reasons for a war is less serious than lying about a blow job. Fine. But we know that these mediawhores have been exposed. They can pretend that none of this was important and they can keep the GOP spin machine going with a few more tired whirls around that pole, but the people who are getting the accolades and the pulitzers and who will be remembered for their excellent reporting during this period will be the ones who have had the chutzpah to speak truth to power.

Digby's post really fits well with the drivel that David Brooks puked onto the pages of the NYT this Sunday, in which he speaks of the end of neo-liberalism. Brooks lazily puts the left blogosphere into the category of the old paleo-liberal establishment, which in his mind refused to play by the rules, which the Blue Dog Dems, the harbinger of Brooks' neo-liberals did. In Brooks' world, the neo-liberals presaged a golden age of some sort of detente between the left and the right, where cooler centrist heads prevailed. Today's bloggers are a throwback to the angry uncompromising left of the past, and in Brooks' mind, that aint good.

The reality is far different. Great bloggers like Digby are calling out the administration for their brazen imperiousness and their tragic incompetence. Gonzalez will go next, whether it is because he's incompetent (today's WSJ), or because he is an apologist for the most absurd constitutional theory that has been posited since FDR, namely John Woo's unitary executive. The attorney general purge will snowball into another issue that fits the same pattern, just as Walter Reed has haunting parallels with Katrina.

We may have a hard time wrapping our heads around constitutional arguments about executive powers, but if there's one thing we don't like, it is a loser. We losing in Iraq, badly. Further, we don't have time for an executive who is an incompetent, and Bush has proven to be one time and again. That is a toxic mix, and I can feel the whole thing falling quickly apart. Brooks and Russert can pine for the old days, when things weren't so nasty in their little world, but it is people like Digby and the other important bloggers who are calling bullshit on this whole sordid affair.