1 Boring Old Man

Thus ends my forray into matters politic. I expect I’ll weigh in some on the aftermath of the Bush Administration, and I look forward to learning more about the back office gyrations that produced so much damage in their seemingly endless eight year reign. But I have no plan to sift the news and blogs daily in hopes of understanding the ins and outs of Barack Obama’s governance. I trust him. That’s why I voted for him. I trust that he’ll do his best to guide the country, and to uphold [and maybe improve on] our founder’s principles.

For many of the bloggers, it’s become a profession. Josh Marshall  of Talking Points Memo has created a News Service that I hope endures. emptywheel [Marcy Wheeler] has emerged as the master of "close reading" – finding the nuanced meanings in the ponderous goverment documents that the rest of us can’t see until she points them out. Digby, of Hullabaloo, is the true pundit who would be a good choice for a cabinet position – chief seer. But, in the main, the blogosphere, at least the part I follow, arose as a way trying to make sense out of a government gone bad – our government. But more than the individual players, it’s the collective blogosphere that shares the credit for almost replacing the traditional fourth establishment, until they began to catch up. Nowhere was this more apparent than in what’s now called the U.S. Attorney Firing Scandal.

Shortly after the last election at the end of 2006, we’d finally elected a [barely] Democratic Congress. The Department of Justice announced the replacement of seven U.S. Attorneys [later nine]. Josh Marshallat TPM  jumped on the story. At the time, the blogosphere was preoccupied with the coming Scooter Libby Trial and a report on the machinations of Douglas Feith. But, in spite of the diversions, Josh stuck with the U.S. Attorney story. It became a Perfect Storm. There was a high state of arrousal in the blogs after several years of pursuing the Valerie Plame story. Nobody trusted anything the Administration did as benign. There was a new Congress with Democrats as Committee Chairmen. In short order, the conspiracy to insert U.S. Attorneys who would pursue Karl Rove’s "voter fraud" agenda [a concerted attempt to intimidate minority voters] moved from theory to obvious fact, and the entire upper eschelon of the DoJ resigned as their politicization was made abundantly clear. Karl Rove himself was removed from the White House in the aftermath. In those Hearings, the posts of the bloggers appeared in the questions of the Congressmen within days. The frustrating three years pursuing the trumped up pre-war intelligence, the many other lies of the Bush Administration, and the outing of Valerie Plame paid off, and the blogosphere came into its own.

But, back to me. I found in the blogs a place to restore my sanity. After the re-election of Bush in 2004, I got depressed. It was about the country – my life was fine. I only knew what I read in the newspapers and saw on television, but it smelled like three day old fish. I couldn’t believe that America had re-elected Bush and Cheney. In the blogs, I found others who smelled the same rotten stench, and writing daily about matters politic gave me a way to deal with the helpless feeling I had when I watched the news. All I knew then was that the government of the United States had been taken over by a gang of crooks. That’s all I really know now, but I know it’s the truth rather than just some vague impression of an old man living in the woods, and I know the details. Writing about it, researching it, gave me a feeling of actively joining a group that wanted to do something about it. Barack Obama’s election is what I, what we, wanted to do about it – replace the Bush Administration with a government that believed in America and had some modicum of integrity.

The blogosphere has firmly established itself as a major player in the fourth establishment – the outside watchdog over our inner government. People will pore over Obama’s every decision, every appointment. They’ll be looking for mistakes, mis-statements, mis-steps. I don’t need to be a part of that. I trust Obama to do the best he can. I trust the bloggers to keep him honest and on task. We’re in a hell of a mess after eight years of incompetence and an ideological nightmare. I have no idea what to do about it. So, I’m going to return to the ranks of the news-watchers and blog readers, leaving the micromanaging to the people who have done it so well and who want to continue doing it.

I know I’ll keep writing for a while. As I mentioned on election night, I have a lot of feelings about what has happened that I need to mull over in the service of moving on. But it’ll be like my last post – looking back at where we’ve been. It helped me to re-read Seymour Hersch‘s article from May 2003, two months after we invaded Iraq! Why didn’t we listen! There was only an embyonic blogosphere back then. There were no "net-roots" to spread the word. It all happened in front of our eyes and we didn’t have something in place to spread it like a wildfire out over the land. The other reason I’m going to fade myself out is that I think that the blogosphere needs to move in a new direction, a direction that’s not in my skill-set.