McCain hates bloggers

Posted by Deanna Zandt at 6:24 AM on May 15, 2006.

An excerpt from the pages of "How To Make Enemies and Alienate People:" John McCain spoke about the egotistic nature of the blogosphere this weekend while giving the commencement speech at Jerry "Gays and Feminists Are To Blame For Everything" Falwell's Liberty University. ThinkProgress has the scoop:

When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights…It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

Jeez, where to begin with this? First, let's see where McCain was when he was speaking... he was at Falwell's digs. Didn't he call Jerry Falwell an "agent of intolerance" at some point? Yes, he sure did.

Then there's the idea that bloggers are all young; as commenters on ThinkProgress quickly pointed out, the latest surveys show that most are over thirty. But most importantly, what a way to alienate and irritate a whole segment of folks; clearly, McCain's performance shows that the man just doesn't give a hoot about the emerging power of citizen media.

Deanna Zandt is a contributing editor at AlterNet.