Comings and Goings Within the Blogosphere

Although Glenn Greenwald has been writing for Salon for a little while now, earlier this week he made it official and took down his shingle over at Unclaimed Territory. He's moved the whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel (but not archives, they're where they've always been) over to Salon. And to make sure they get their money's worth, he's been tearing it up this week. He's been writing posts about General Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not only distancing himself from Bushie rhetoric about Iran's involvement in Iraq, but downright contradicting it; about FireDogLake's coverage of the Libby trial and the notice and respect it's been getting from the mainstream media (even National Review has been using it as a primary source)--will this force the media to reevaluate its stereotype of liberal bloggers as dirty, stinking, hippies?; about David Broder's, and by extension the Washington media establishment's desperation for the Prez to pull out of his popular opinion death spiral. His best (and most provocative, or is that redundant) blog title so far has to be "Neoconservatives hate liberty as much as they love war." Just as he did at Unclaimed Territory, he's making his new Salon blog a must-stop destination on the blog rounds.

While you're over at Salon, be sure to read Amanda Marcotte's explanation for why she held a position as a staff blogger for the John Edwards campaign for just a little over a week. She blogs at Pandagon (which is currently switching servers, so no link), but for a brief, shining moment, she moved to the higher-profile Edwards blog gig, but then the right-wing smear machine targeted her. Her experience was not pretty. Why would a bunch of right wingers care who blogged for John Edwards? Amanda has her suspicions:

Whether or not it was the intention of the right-wing noise machine to throw more obstacles in the way of Democrats who want to play to their pro-choice, pro-gay rights feminist constituents -- it's also plausible that the right-wing noise machine was working on pure misogynist emotion -- the episode has had a chilling effect on the future of Democratic outreach to feminist communities, particularly the younger ones that flock to computers for political information as earlier generations flocked to television sets and newspapers.

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The liberal blogs are slowly but surely building a fundraising structure that is already beginning to have substantial influence on elections. They helped Jim Webb become a senator and Joe Lieberman become an Independent. Blogs also provide a method of disseminating progressive ideas to people, while the mainstream cable news channels carry on for weeks at a time on topics such as Anna Nicole Smith's untimely demise. Liberal blogs are issue-oriented and good at parsing out complex ideas that don't fit well into the sound-bite-driven mainstream discourse. They are a good fit for wonky Democrats. It's therefore unsurprising that conservatives might want to dissuade Democrats from hiring them.

It's a cautionary tale, but the caution we should really be taking from it is to be more prepared the next time the right wing cranks up its smear machine.