Becuase Everything Else Sucks

America Blog Sucks: I’m Tired of Seeing Paul, Gravel, & Kucinich

By Manila Ryce
Published Sunday, July 15th, 2007, 6:51 am
Filed under: Videos: Political, Videos, US Politics

Yeah, I said it. Fuck ‘em. At an NAACP forum, Clinton and Edwards were discussing how they could exclude less “serious” but threatening candidates like Kucinich and Gravel from future debates. My guess would be to place a cover charge at the door of each event. Anyway, John Aravosis of America Blog supports this plutocratic form of control, in which billionaires battle billionaires over who can say the least and accomplish just as much in terms of progress. Did your parents ever tell you that you could be president someday? Well, unless they were Bill and Melinda Gates, they lied their asses off.

WPvideo 1.10

Aravosis doesn’t want candidates who bring issues like the war, health care, taxes, or global warming to these forums, but in the following sentence says he wants serious debate. Um, apparently not Mr. Aravosis. You do realize that the “serious” candidates don’t do serious debate, right? If only I could afford a frontal lobotomy, I bet I too could cheerlead for corporate candidates and still pretend my blog was progressive. I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror anymore, but what does that matter as long as our corporate sponsors beat their corporate sponsors in the next election? I can see Aravosis now, sitting in front of his television with a big foam hand, watching the political theater like a wrestling event. He knows it’s fake, but who wants to watch real wrestling? USA! USA! USA!

Update: Fuck Kos too.

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9 Responses to “America Blog Sucks: I’m Tired of Seeing Paul, Gravel, & Kucinich”

  1. You’re sexy when you’re mad, Manila.

    Blue Gal
    07/15/07 at 8:51 am

  2. I heartily concur. Fuck ‘em all.

    WillySF
    07/15/07 at 3:13 pm

  3. Is it just me, or are these three having way too much fun talking about bombing people in the first half of this video? It’s unfortunate that CNN believes these are the talking heads our country deserves. Sanchez is pretty hilarious though, and he does stick up for the marginalized candidates by saying a debate without them would be complete bs.

    I think there should be an anti-Kos/Aravosis/etc. post once a day here. Traffic would skyrocket. There are a lot of people on the left who are sick of their outsider yet oh-so-establishment shtick.

    evmonk
    07/15/07 at 4:26 pm

  4. Not to mention all the great bloggers who only started blogging because they were banned by Americablog.

    Blue Gal
    07/15/07 at 4:31 pm

  5. @Ev
    That’s a good idea, if simply for the sake of pointing out spin on the blogosphere. This isn’t personal. It’s about honest debate and honest journalism. Blogs exist so we can offer an independent perspective on the news. Blogs police the mainstream media, and call them out when they state falsehoods, but who polices the blogosphere? More bloggers need to start speaking out against their fellow bloggers instead of having a “we’re all in this together,” mentality which gets no one anywhere. We’re suppose to empower the people, not manipulate them. Americablog and Kos are some of the worst, and hardly an “alternative” to the mainstream media. Believe me, I’d do a daily post critiquing them if I actually could stomach reading their tripe that often.

    Manila Ryce
    07/15/07 at 5:51 pm

  6. You know, it’s not rich people’s fault you’re poor and bitter.

    Why should they suffer because you didn’t have a daddy who had a daddy who had a daddy who stole from the American Indians?

    Huh?

    Yeah, that’s what I thought.

    Never heard of “Americablog”, but that Kos place sucks.

    What a bunch of wankers.

    fairlane
    07/17/07 at 9:25 am

  7. Hey Fairlane, shows how much you know about me. I do have family that steals from American Indians. In fact, my uncle packed at least half a dozen towels from the Pechanga Resort & Casino not more than two weeks ago.

    Manila Ryce
    07/18/07 at 4:55 am

  8. Manila - I neglect to say this due to a lack of time these days for anything besides work, kids and school, but this site is a great achievement. I think it kicks ass week after week, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to be a part of it.

    On the topic at hand though - I’ve been booted from enough top traffic political blogs over the years to know that there is a point where it changes for a lot of people, from being an organic expression of oneself, to something more closely associated with spreadsheets and earnings forecasts.

    KOS is an interesting case study in this, as the community is enormous, so the odds of being noticed are slim, yet there is a tremendous amount of good writing/investigatory work (the diary rescues!) posted there, and as long as one approaches it as a reader and not a participant (for me this is the case), it’s a great venue. I had one or two of my pieces rescued, and at times would have a diary read and commented on quite well…though the second I posted a diary criticizng the 24/7 Lamont binge as it was happening, I was a memory.

    It was something simple like…”Why bother Senator Akaka (HI) over supporting Lieberman? This diary is reccomended by a thousand people with 300 comments, and for what? If I were Akaka wouldn’t I do the same thing? Perhaps. Why? Because Lieberman could still win, and pissing in the guy’s Cheerois now, would mean he’s one less vote I can count on when an ammendment of mine is in the balance. Lamont would be a freshman senator and very wet behind the ears as well…he’s not strolling into the senate looking to settle scores with the veteran senators who didn’t support him in the campaign!!!”

    That was unacceptable to the KOS community. And I may be off-base in critizing…I might just be in a different place in terms of politics…we’re all different. In general though, large movements of people who follow a leader scare me as a rule. This blogger here could be getting paid. I wouldn’t doubt it.

    I’d have taken Microsoft’s free laptop w/ Vista…but money to advocate a political position and defend it on my blog…”don’t cross the streams”…I’d feel like a whore.

    Al Swearengen
    07/18/07 at 8:40 pm

  9. I just had to come back here to say that, despite my issues with DailyKos I stand in absolute solidarity with them on this issue: http://alternet.org/mediaculture/57270/. That’s a video of O’Reilly saying DailyKos is “like the Klu Klux Klan, it’s like the Nazi Party, there’s no difference here.”

    Of course I wouldn’t expect anyone here to agree with O’Reilly, but I think vocal support of Kos in this case is important. For O’Reilly to pull a few of the millions of comments from that site and use them as representative is just about the most disingenuous thing a media personality could do.

    Anyway Manila, I read most of these blogs (not Americablog though) and I think they are decent alternatives to the MSM, I just think they could do much better. You’re right that their “we’re all in this together” message is skewed — they don’t even know who “we” is. Kos said in 2004 that:

    “This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog. One that recognizes that Democrats run from left to right on the ideological spectrum, and yet we’re all still in this fight together…We happily embrace centrists like NDN’s Simon Rosenberg and Howard Dean, conservatives like Martin Frost and Brad Carson, and liberals like John Kerry and Barack Obama.”

    First of all, it’s a sad statement of the American Left when John Kerry can be its figurehead. But ultimately, I think what the DailyKos movement is about is power. Not just power for power’s sake, because most of the people in that community are well-intentioned, but at the end of the day it is about electing Democrats and being a part of that power. Their mission is too explicitly political for me, and the focus on party politics waters down their message, but it’s still a move in the right direction. In other words, we’re better off today with everything that’s happening on the internet than we were 5 or 10 years ago.

    Anyway, we do need to be critical of the leaders of the “netroots.” Increasingly, DailyKos and sites like it are facing conflicts of interest as powerful Democrats try to buy them off. I don’t think Kos is explicitly on the payroll of any Dems, but you’d be crazy to think that there isn’t a strong and developing relationship between these liberal blogs and elected leaders. And because many of these blogs started with an explicitly political focus — one that values political power even over truth and, as your Common post points out, the people — we’re right to be wary of their allegiances.

    evmonk
    07/19/07 at 8:08 am

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