Maybe he wants us to say we’re sorry for the war

July 28, 2006

When Ezra said that TNR’s Lee Siegel blamed bloggers for the continuation of the war in Iraq, I thought maybe he had read it wrong. Alas, Ezra didn’t — Siegel actually wrote that.

All the bite-sized thoughts, rapid disses, and inanely meandering threads make it hard to concentrate on anything for very long. Linking is no substitute for thinking. So people scream because they can’t focus. You have the impression of bloggers who are so pacified by shouting their rage — and so appeased by smugly shared sentiments — that they turn off their computers at night and go to sleep feeling empowered and relaxed.

No wonder, several years after the blogosphere allegedly became a people powerhouse, the country is mired even deeper in Iraq and successfully distracted by one false public alarm after another.

I’ve read Siegel’s column a few times, hoping that I might fully understand what in the world he’s talking about. Maybe my mind is encumbered with too many “bite-sized thoughts,” and burdened by “smug rage,” to fully appreciate the argument, but it certainly sounds as if Siegel believes bloggers are somehow responsible for the U.S. being “mired even deeper in Iraq.”

I’m not one for TNR bashing, but this is just incoherent.

Well, you see CB, if we weren’t wasting our time blogging and commenting we would be out in the streets marching against the war and as we all know, Boy George II is so impressed with peace protesters he’d just bring the Americans home tomorrow.

Oh, yah! That’s a load of crap!

Just ask Cindy Sheehan.

  • He’s taking a page from the wingnut noise machine. Blame the people you don’t like for the things you don’t like and call it a day. It doesn’t have to stand up to reason. It just has to feel good.

  • “that they turn off their computers at night and go to sleep feeling empowered and relaxed.” – L. Siegel

    What an idiot this guy Siegel is.

    I turn off my computer and go to sleep knowing without a doubt that I’m going to wake up, turn on the radio and hear something about the actions and policies of our gov’t that is stupider and more demented and more distressingly dispiriting than I’ve ever before heard in my whole life.

    Mr. CB, you are a sneaky guy. Here I thought I was hanging out here for well over a year reading like minded posts and garnering the wisdom of kindred spirits and now I find that you are helping to prolong our countries immersion in this wasteful war and the commentors are undermining our gov’t’s efforts to extract us from the difficulties we so unexpectedly find ourselves in. Boy, you sure pulled the wool over my eyes.

  • “Incoherent” hardly covers it. Is he talking about liberal bloggers? Conservative bloggers? Bloggers of no discernable political opinion? The lunatic freepers?

    It’s also somewhat mindboggling that he ascribes so much power to such a small group of people and the (relatively) small number of people who make blog reading a habit. On the other hand, he’s setting bloggers up nicely for the Repug “stab in the back” legend that’s going to pop up like a vile weed as soon as the war in Iraq is well and truly lost for good.

    Now I’m going to return to the powerpoint I’m working on feeling empowered and relaxed. Ahhhhhhh!

  • Lee Siegel’s comments are equivalent to challenging an apponent by throwing a chair across the wrestling ring, a la WWF style.

    TNR can drown in their own spittle for all I care. Its no skin off my back.

  • This guy is far too inarticulate and incoherent to convince anyone of anything, but let me try to figure this one out. At first, it just seems like your typical rambling diatribe, and hypocritical at that, since he pretty much falls right into the category of what he is attempting to criticize. If you take out the clause, “several years…,” you get “no wonder the country is mired deeper in iraq…”. So the logic here is,

    1) bloggers share ideas, that he calls bite sized, inane, meandering thoughts and disses, and this makes the citizenry of the US unable to concentrate.
    2) the linking of source material rules out thinking, and since they dont think and none can concentrate, they scream.
    3)said shared screaming appeases them and helps them sleep at night.

    So, are we to infer that this rant induced passivity somehow means that, if it didnt exist, we would have been doing something else with our time (perhaps protesting) and we would be out of Iraq?

    The only logical conclusion you can take away from this is that it is targeted at right wing bloggers, because if it is, these arguments actually are pretty accurate and descriptive – they dont think; they scream often; they band together to keep up their delusional idea that Iraq is a success.

    By doing so, the liberal floggers are kept flat footed, because all of the reasoned argument that goes on here that would make it plain that we shouldnt be in Iraq anymore, goes unheeded.

    So, we have no policy, other than stay the course, and it’s all the bloggers fault.

    Wow. And this guy thinks himself a writer? How quaint.

  • Lee Siegel is proof that computers are now so user-friendly that those bipeds lacking frontal lobes and opposable thumbs can (and do!) now use them. When you look up “overweening New York pseudo-intellectual,” the definition is a photo of Lee Siegel.

    Further proof you should stock up on The New Republican for the coming toilet paper shortage.

  • Having now read at first three paragraphs, this basically comes down to “poor widdo Lee, nobody likes him.”

    His whole bit is “Mom-meeee! They’re calling me bad names!!”

    I bet this little putz was chased home from school every day for being such a twerp in class – can you imagine being around a little schmuck like him doing this in person?

    Whoever compared him to a “hurt, angry Burt Reynolds” gave him the best compliment he’s likely ever received.

  • I am also baffled…distracted successfully by one public alarm after another? what does this have to do with blogging? the DHS is run by bloggers? the majority of the population are bloggers? people who panic at these distractions are bloggers?

    No explanation of cause and effect, just mindless dribbling at the high chair while banging with his spoon

  • Don’t worry about it. He seems puzzled that someone called him a “Douchbag”. He lacks the mental capacity to realize that, in fact, he *is* a douchbag…

    As Fox ratings continue to fall, as O’Reilly’s viewers continue to age and die, you figure that sooner or later the corporate types that pay for this garbage will realize that pandering to the miniscule number of dellusional people who still think that Iraq is going swimmingly, George Bush tells the truth, and Sadam has WMD’s hidden in his nut sack, is just bad for the bottom line – then what will these blow hards do for a living?

    -jjf

  • “and so appeased by smugly shared sentiments — that they turn off their computers at night and go to sleep feeling empowered and relaxed.”

    Doesn’t describe me a bit. When I got DSL sometime in 2003 and discovered all the online political information that I never knew existed, I don’t think that I’ve had a truly restful moment since I found out what was happening to my country.

  • Same here marcus…Ive had dsl a bit longer, but hadnt ever decided to dig below the surface of the news until a few years back, when it seemed it was worth knowing why our country was headed to the shitter. My sleep patterns are now permanently disturbed, knowing I have to wake up and read yet more about the con job that is being perpetrated by our so called leaders.

  • I’m a constant blog reader but I may get what Siegel is saying. I’ve thought before that although there is a lot to be said for the constant airing of opinions (in blogs and in other ways) in this country, there is a sense in which talking about a thing is replacing acting on it.

    There are many examples throughout history of mass demonstrations and strikes making the difference when a populace decided its government was out of hand. There have been demonstrations against the war, but overall the preferred method for speaking out against the war is to talk to people around us about how much it sucks, not to gather some friends and go yell outside our state’s capitol building. Generally speaking, a lot of Americans (myself included) would probably make a lot more difference in the policies of this administration if we walked into our congressman’s office or marched down a street or disrupted a photo op, but we don’t. We write a comment on a blog or bitch to our co-workers and friends and we fume at the TV, but we don’t DO anything.

    Siegel may be incoherent, but he’s onto something here – he just isn’t able to think clearly about it and articulate what the real problem is. A lot of bloggers are also activists, so he’s probably thinking of people like me who comment on blogs, not those who write them. But he’s got a point about us, and it stings. There are less strident, spontaneous demonstrations against this corrupt and criminal administration than there should be, and it’s part of what lets them get away with their corruption and criminality. They’d be corrupt and criminal without us; but we help them by our refusal to leave the house and yell somewhere.

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