The Gravitas of Print

Yours truly gets a "token conservative" mention in today's Denver Post, in an article about how the Western Left is using blogs to organization. Of course, there are many more Western conservatives than liberals, making far better use of the blogosphere than the Left is, but the focus of the article is on the "liberal rage" spurring their flight to the Internet.

While the article does a credible job of analyzing the self-destructive dynamics of the current Democratc party, it does make a couple of mistakes. Republican rage at Clinton was not only less psychotic, but also eventually resulted in a candidate and a platform that was positive and stood for something. It's worth repeating that Clinton presided over uniform losses for his party, which Bush has presided over gains for his.

More saliently, the article tries to make the blogosphere into a leftist version of talk radio - a place for the excluded to go develop an audience and an agenda. But the right was also first into the blogosphere, and has certainly made better grass-roots use of it so far. The left is playing catch-up, and, as with their "liberal talk radio network," the effort is top-down rather than bottom-up.