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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
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Sunday, September 19, 2004
13:49 - Denial of the conspiracy is the surest sign that it exists

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Huh boy... I really don't know whether I should laugh or cry. As long as I can be sure that this really is the form the Left's death throes will take this election season, and that they won't be rewarded for this kind of insanity with a victory at the polls.

See, what's apparently happening is that now that all the big media outlets (except for CBS) have acknowledged that the Killian memos are fakes, they're shifting to a hysterical wave of finger-pointing, to try to figure out where they came from—and of course it couldn't have been one of their own, pure as the driven snow that they are. The prime suspects, of course, are Bush and Karl Rove, in an ingenious insidious ploy that has used the blogosphere and the mainstream media both as musical instruments in the hands of some Satanic virtuoso.

How does one come to believe that this is how "the other side" works? How does one come to believe in the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy? How does a magazine like Time descend so far into madness to headline an upcoming exposé, "Bush Campaign Keeping Close Eye on Blogs, Using Them To Mainline Information to the G.O.P. Faithful" (via LGF)? I mean, I know I have never been contacted by dark-suited operatives offering to feed me information manufactured or illegally purloined so as to thwart the Kerry campaign. I can't imagine Powerline or LGF or InstaPundit being similarly "mainlined", mostly because these guys write the way they think: carefully. Maybe I'm just isolated in some odd islet of unconventional thought with the rest of these guys, but I've always been under the impression that the widely-read right-wing bloggers are such because of their own reasoning, not because of what they're being told to believe by GOP operatives.

After all, LGF points out that the likes of Matthew Yglesias see nothing wrong with explicitly mentioning the names of people in the Daschle office and Kerry campaign who are "mainlining" the Left side of the blogosphere with powdered dirt. So apparently it's just assumed that there's a similar force directing the right-wing blogs like marionettes, but it's just too shadowy and sinister for us to give it its name. We couldn't, of course, have been clever enough on our own to, say, recognize the Killian memos as fakes without a "highly technical" dossier on them being fed into the Freepersphere by a top-hatted undercover agent by the name of "Buckhead". Without that analysis we'd never have seen those stupid Word printouts for what they were.

I could choose to be insulted that the other side would think us so gullible and dependent upon outside help; or I could choose to be disappointed that they think the things we believe are so untenable that we have to have superiors feeding us intravenously with distilled "talking points" to regurgitate; or I could choose to be saddened that they apparently do have to have such top-down direction, without which their narrative rapidly shakes itself to pieces, between calling a scandal "no big deal" and then jumping up and down about the conspiracy that must be in charge of such a devastating blow to their credibility.

What is there to do but sit and slowly shake one's head back and forth?


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