DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga offered a stirring defense of the progressive blogosphere. Read the full speech here.
UPDATE: Watch it:
Below is a key snippet:
[Before the blogosphere arose,] people like me could spend hours talking about politics, but it mattered little in the greater scheme of things. Then technology changed everything.
Whether it was blogs, or podcasting, or social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, or MoveOn, or YouTube, people quickly adopted myriad communication technologies emerging from the web and turned them to political purposes. Millions did so.
And while individually we were still nobodies, together, we became … somebody. A very important somebody. And that makes some people very uncomfortable.
Like David Broder. Joe Klein. Robert Novak. Bill O’Reilly
Echoing what so many of his colleagues think, Bill Kristol on Fox News was outraged that anyone would take us seriously. He called me a, ” left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago.”
And he was right. In their world, I wasn’t “respectable”. None of us were. As our good friend Atrios likes to say, We weren’t “very serious people.”
You see, we weren’t stupid and gullible enough to fall for the administration’s lies on Iraq.
Those “respectable” people couldn’t stop praising Bush for being “bold,” and “resolute”. They fueled what has now become the biggest foreign policy debacle in American history.
They told us to capitulate to Republicans on Iraq in 2002 and 2004.
Democrats listened… and lost.
They said us crazy bloggers were pushing the party to the left, and that our increasing influence would doom Democrats to electoral defeat in 2006 and beyond.
David Brooks in The NY Times wrote in 2005 that thanks to bloggers — those rabid flying venomous sheep – Democrats would be sure to carry just Berkeley for decades to come.
Many Democrats nodded along in agreement.
Did we listen? No.
In 2006, those respectable people said Democrats couldn’t win unless they continued cheerleading that war.
Did we listen? (No) We weren’t that stupid.
The respectable people said that electing Howard Dean chair of the Democratic Party would doom us to perpetual minority status.
Did we listen? (No)
They said that we had to privatize social security.
Did we listen? (No)
They told us we should fear “San Francisco Liberal” Nancy Pelosi.
Did we listen? (No)
They said there was nothing nefarious about the outing of Valerie Plame.
Did we listen? (No)
They said targeting Joe Lieberman would cost us the Senate.
Did we listen? (No)
No we didn’t listen. Of course not.
And then in 2006, we won.
Blogger Oliver Willis recently put it perfectly: “I used to believe that a lot of these people were just talking over my head, their discourse too lofty for a regular guy like myself. But that isn’t true.
They’re just stupid.”
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