(hog on ice should brazenly steal this logo, its a lot cooler than their current one)
Hog on Ice is depressed about the right side of the blogland. The conservative establishment doesn’t give us love, we have no chance for advancement, the left is kicking our asses in engagement, fund-raising, etc. etc.
Lighten up dude. The conservative side just works differently. For every Jane Hamster f-wording her way through a jeramiad, we have Powerline debunking (and unseating) a network anchor, a network president, John Kerry, etc. etc. We serve more as a counter-balance to the long-held monopoly the left has had on the media. Imagine several million tiny Rush Limbaughs (as in not as many viewers/listeners rather than poundage).
Rushbo transformed conservatives because they found they were not alone and not out of step, as the alphabet networks and the NYT would have them believe. Now we can network even better, and the movement is more coherent and effective. Its just not the same as the leftwingnuts.
Read MyDD- its deadly dull, he sweats every little pissant congressional district race and half-baked poll and wonky nonsense like that, that don’t mean shit in the big picture. He acts serious (My Due Diligence, jesus titty fucking christ) but he’s full of blue mud. That kind of minutiae don’t move the public’s bowels. Powerline, Insta-pundit and HotAir can cause conservatives to take a big healthy crap where it counts, (see Harriet Miers and the immigration debate). Mostly, they point up stuff that fires up the troops and gives them empty hope, then they get twice as crushed when they don’t win like the media told them they would. Notice Newt’s strategy of telling conservatives 80-20% chance we’re gonna lose in ’08. Instead of empty hope, get the troops mad and moving. Works better than the left echo-chamber.
I’ll tell you something else the right does better- Fisking and ridiculing lefty sites. Leftwingnut bloggers don’t read the enemy near as much as we do. They mostly echo each other, they ignore negative stories about dems or inconvenience hard news that doesn’t fit their world-view or their narrative. The Righties engage stuff like Larry Craig and get it all out there – that kind of rough and tumble builds better debaters. You don’t see the lefties talking about William Jefferson’s frozen bribe money. They are weaker because of this trait.
The left can claim Jeff Gannon as their big success. I give them zero credit for ’06 gains, in fact, the gains were made in spite of them and probably would have been greater if they would just STFU and quit scaring the children.
You ask me, the “success” of the nutroots is eventually going to split the Dems. I been saying it for years, and I keep saying it, and its going to happen. The nutroots don’t share well. They don’t play well with others. They are NOT going to completely take over an entrenched establishment party like the Dems, the grownups keep pushing back, and eventually the nutroots are going to take their football and go home: i.e. start a new party.
They want complete and total adherence to “progressive” standards and brook no deviation from the nutroots party line, which is often, although not always, the Dem party line.
The right, on the other hand, has no such touchy feelings nor ambitions to take over the party and elect dogmatic robots.
The Dems will be consigned to minority status for a generation or more, but that won’t necessarily be such a good thing, seeing how the Reps acted when they controlled the trifecta the last few years before ’06.
A main point is that the American public likes conservative values and policies. They don’t like leftist tenets. The Left does best when the conservatives fuck up badly or when the left successfully camouflages its candidates’ true intentions and beliefs. Most of the seats won by Dems in ’06 were by Dems masquerading as conservatives (and some are still acting that way, and pissing off the nutroots)
But at least we’ll get to stack the Supreme Court to the hilt and that’s the prize that really matters. So its all good, bromide. 🙂