Firing Squad Looms for the Dem Party Oligarchy

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted August 23, 2006.

Question: Are bloggers too powerful?

Answer: Do I think they're important? Yes. Do I think the [bloggers] and Al Sharpton alone are the future of the Democratic Party? No! Welcome in, contribute, but it's about winning in November and moving the country forward, not about a firing squad in a circle.

I badly want to move on to another topic in this column space -- there is very little in the world that is less interesting than the Democratic Leadership Council and their ilk -- but this stuff is fast becoming just too unbelievable to ignore.

What exactly does self-appointed congressional mega-celebrity and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emmanuel mean (says a friend of mine in congress of him: "He's an amoral, showboating cock") when he says, "Do I think [bloggers] and Al Sharpton are the future of the Democratic Party?"

That's actually not hard to figure out; it's political hack-ese for the human sentence bloggers = Al Sharpton. As for what he means by that: just think about the thought process that had to go into Emmanuel's adding of the phrase "and Al Sharpton," when Al Sharpton wasn't even part of the question. Ask yourself if you really believe Emmanuel isn't aware that he's addressing the mostly white, Upper West Side readers of New York magazine when he "offhandedly" ties bloggers to the legendary gold medallion-wearing icon from forty blocks north in Harlem.

These DLC types are amazing, they really are. Their pathology is unique; they all secretly worship the guilt-by-association tactics of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, but unlike those two, not one of them has enough balls to take being thought of as the bad guy by the general public. So instead of telling big, bold whoppers right out in the open, they're forever coming out with backhanded little asides like this one, apparently in the hope that only your subconscious will notice. I won't be surprised if they respond to the next electoral loss by a DLC candidate by having Bruce Reed argue in the Wall Street Journal that "bloggers, Queer Eye, and Arabs with syphilis are not the future of the Democratic Party."

Then there is the phrase, "Welcome in, contribute, but..."

Welcome in? What is this, a political party, or a house in the fucking Hamptons? Who died and made these people gatekeepers to anything?

What Emmanuel appears to be saying here is that "bloggers" -- by which he really means "people who voted against Lieberman" -- are welcome to "contribute," but not welcome to actually decide elections. In other words, we'll take your votes, but we'll decide who you vote for. An admirable sentiment for an elected official. How is it that these people have avoided being pitchforked to death for this long?

Finally, the "firing squad in a circle" line has been a DLC favorite for years. DLC chief Al From has been pimping it at least since the last presidential race. It's time we officially retired this line, which is really just a sorry take on the lame old high-school guidance-counselor saw: "Now, Jimmy. When you shoot spitballs at Vice Principal Anderson, you're really shooting spitballs at yourself." And little Jimmy thinks: No, actually, I was shooting spitballs at Vice Principal Anderson...

What's amazing about the "firing squad in a circle" line is that it is inevitably used less than five seconds after the DLC speaker has just finished dumping on Michael Moore, peace activists, or whoever the party's talking-points-vermin of the day is (In this case, Sharpton and bloggers). He denounces Michael Moore as a disgrace to the party, then turns around and says that when we attack the party leadership, we're only hurting ourselves. These tactics are so transparent and condescending that one longs for some kind of cosmic referee to just drop down from the heavens and unilaterally disqualify their users on the grounds of their overwhelming general wrongness -- but the maddening thing about these DLC creatures is that that referee never arrives, and Al From is back on page one again the next day, shaking his head and grumbling piously about "unity" and "consensus" and "the lost art of bipartisanship."

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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