Upon reading the announcement, my partner Darcy said, "I hope the Edwards campaign knows what it's in for."

"I'm sure they do," I said.

from Arvin Hill's Carnival of Horror:

http://arvinhill.blogspot.com/2007/02/cold-turkey.html

(see the comments)

"After pondering this little dust-up, I believe the Edwards Campaign saw this as a two-fer. Props from the netroots for the hires, and when it all goes south, a Sista Souljah moment for Edwards. Even the most marginal campaign talent could've choreographed such an Aaron Spelling-ish drama... so Edwards probably hatched it himself.

Edwards is certainly calculating enough to have generated the event. The Earnest Candidate, having spun plates with his fellow entertainers, Donohue & Malken, delivered a pitch perfect FUCK YOU to the potty-mouthed, left-leaning Dem bloggers standing between him and the nomination because of his Pro-Bush, Pro-War, Pro-Death vote in The Senate. Anyone who thinks that kind of opportunity just happens probably believes in dragons and unicorns."

You say "Bob" offered you the job before Marcotte. I wonder if he would've been less likely to offer you the gig if your blog had a more sober-sounding title that would've made you less of a potential target for right-wing wrath. Please don't misunderstand me Lindsay: I'm not suggesting the tactics of persons like Donohue are acceptable, or that you need to be defensive about your blog's name; rather, I expect that Arvin's "two-fer" hypothesis is sound, and was intended to apply to you as well. Bob's lack of concern about your ongoing blogging only reinforces this.

but now that Carter is on the outs with the AIPAC types, what will perennial Gore booster Martin Peretz say?

All I know is, if Gore is waiting for more encouragement before he decides-- and I note that he hasn't ruled it out-- he better decide pretty quickly if he hopes to have a shot.

For my part, I think quite a few of the more prominent bloggers do in fact aspire to "the big time." If you read a lot of blogs, not necessarily all that worthy an endeavor, you can catch the occasional whiff of careerism: bloggers who close ranks in discussing the democrats and scold other lefty bloggers who don't, as well as bloggers who seem to relentlessly discuss the same NY Times and Washington Post articles everybody else does, pursuing "traction" on technorati.

When you watch the local tv news, don't you ever have a sense of which of the younger reporters seem more preoccupied with being the next Stone Phillips or Katie Couric than the rest of them? I'll bet you do!

and if you want to dismiss my view as the sour grapes of a not-so prominent blogger, well, that's your privilege, although I'm mostly content doing the equivelant of the farm report.

This may sound like a good idea if it actually worked as intended-- up to a point. the fifty bucks to be directed by the voters sounds like a good idea, as does substantially increased limits on private donations, but keeping the big money secret is an invitation for creative corruption.

I'm not going to give ANYBODY a hundred grand, or even ten grand, if I can't hope to influence them, or with no means to communicate that I did so. If the big money private donations were made private, people with big money would still find a way to make known their financial directives to the politicos, but it would be outside the public eye, laundered in various ways. This is better?

And ordinary people would no longer at least know who owns their politicians-- and they'd still be owned by others.

so now they know-- and people will undoubtedly say,

"hey, I heard that guy who said you can't go into a 7-11 without encountering an Indian is running for president!"

"Is he a republican?"

"No, I don't think so..."

Maybe he could say he was looking at Virgil Goode's notes while absentmindedly talking, and the words were not really his own. It could happen to anybody.

Undoubtedly it's a little unreasonable to expect every member of a panel to endorse every item in the report they've worked on for many months, allegedly in order to make a meaningful contribution to the goal of successfully ending the war.

Nevertheless, if you agree to be a member of the panel-- not just a member but a marquee player whose name is often used as a synonym for the report, as in Baker-Hamilton Report--- then shouldn't you be expected to actually believe in your Study Group's report, or at the very least be someone who pretends to believe in your own report?

The only reasonable conclusion at this point is

A.that the ISG was a snow-job that none of you fancy people really believed in, but at least you got to demonstrate how much you care, etc, etc.

and

B.Your current testimony is also a snow job. Clearly we shouldn't believe anything you say, James Baker.

I keep thinking of that line from Blazing Saddles:

"You know what this means? We gotta protect our phoney-baloney jobs!"

except in this instance one would substitute "president" for jobs.