This particular passage sums it up nicely, I think:
Look at the activity on each side. Conservative bloggers further down the ecosphere compiled opinions of other conservative bloggers. Liberal bloggers as well as their everyday readers spent their time investigating public data and building a case.
The popular meme I have caught is the reference to the conservative side of the blogosphere as the "Borg", apparently an indication of hive mentality. (Sorry, I've never really watched Star Trek, nor any of the spinoffs, so the context I've gleaned through osmosis may be somewhat erroneous.) The few overtly conservative blogs I check into (Sun Tzu reminds us that the effective general always knows what his enemy is thinking) do seem to be remarkably consistent with one another, and constantly trade attributions with one another.
Liberal bloggers seem more interested (in my humble estimation) in pulling together the stories and facts (including from each other, of course, but it's generally a pretty quick step to a readily attributable info source, rather than another blogger) and coming up with their own take. This is why they're so hard to mobilize -- it's like herding cats. But this story is starting to become its own wampeter of sorts, a rallying point for the liberals who see in this story a useful consolidation of Republican moral hypocrisy and likely corruption.
Watching it gain traction and credence has been interesting, and that is where I think it may have stumped some of the more partisan conservative bloggers. They do not tend to fight well when they're on their heels, so to speak, and the particulars of this story have been especially unhelpful to the perpetuation of the pet causes of many of their more devout believers. Many of them are used to spending time and effort defending the indefensible by smearing the other side. This becomes problematic when someone with Jim Guckert's past enters the picture. So, since this story functions as a fairly consistent reduction of how the actualization of Republican (more like neo-con) policy tends to fly in the face of American notions of societal good and individual dignity, they've had a tough time of it in finding a proper handle on this story that they can exploit using their usual demonization model.
Between this episode and the current stunning lack of success in Bush's attempt to push Social Security down the proverbial flight of stairs, there may be cracks forming in this machine. If the cats can be properly herded, the cracks can be duly wedged and exploited. This is critical, because the media, despite its many recent embarrassments, has shown no real signs of learning from its poor performance. So they cannot be counted on; they will have to be carefully prodded, with accurate accounts of the facts at hand, before they'll get in to do any real digging.
The current conservative distraction, as the FFFT analysis points out, is that the left is whooping it up over a relatively minor "scalp", since we are all apparently now cultivating the practice of collecting scalps. This is merely reflexive on their part, and masks some possibly deeper problems in the narrative of this story. Eason Jordan is a nice claim for them, but he's not a household name; Dan Rather is their big "scalp".
As it may very well turn out that names on the Dan Rather scoop may have been handed to Guckert by someone in the White House (rhymes with "drove"), Guckert's scalp may well end up cancelling out Rather's. But more importantly, it may serve to pull the curtain back on their whole rotten little media-management scheme.
Don't be surprised if they (either the GOPUSA party arms, or Faux News, or even some of the big-kahuna righty bloggers) try to hand off some blankets loaded with smallpox, such as bunk information designed to be passed off as truth for the lefty bloggers to use, that can then later be exposed as a hoax, thus discrediting everything that has surfaced up to this point.
Very concise and interesting post, man. I like the herding-cats reference. So true.
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