You're all a bunch of immature, foul-mouthed jerks

Posted by Melissa McEwan at 9:01 AM on May 2, 2006.

Actually, I'm not talking to you. Mike McCurry (and here) and Joe Klein are.

McCurry:

I wonder what kind of conversations folks have when they aren't screaming at each other on the web or elsewhere?

[…]

Reading lots of comments on my last post, I guess my point got made: the culture and discourse of the Internet is not what you would teach kids at the dinner table -- unless you kept a bar of soap handy.

Klein:

The Stephanopoulos moment came and went ephemerally, as TV moments do, leaving a slight, queasy residue — I knew that I hadn't explained myself adequately, but that happens a lot on television. So thanks, frothing bloggers, for calling me on my mistake. You can, at times, be a valuable corrective.

At other times, though, your vitriol just seems uninformed, malicious and disproportionate. You seem to believe that since I'm not a lock-step liberal — and we can talk about what a liberal actually is some other time — I'm some sort of creepy, covert conservative.

Chris Bowers over at MyDD takes a look at these couple of posts and finds an emerging anti-netroots narrative that casts Beltway insiders as "the adults" and the netroots as unruly teenagers--young, rabid, inexperienced, arrogant, uninformed.

Of course, none of these things are true of the netroots as a whole, or even can be seen as an accurate classification of their majority. In fact:

Only 42% of Dean activists reported the 2004 Presidential campaign as their first Presidential campaign, and we are less than one year away from that number dropping much further…

[T]he 2006 Blogads survey suggested a median age of 46 for netroots activists, which is hardly young by any national standard…

Considering our media consumption and political engagement habits, if we are uninformed, than everyone in the country is uninformed. However, the netroots is not uninformed--it just comes from different professional and social circles than the DC political class…

The netroots were basically formed out of a long series of losses by progressives… I have said it before, and I will say it again: if "leaders" of the Democratic Party and progressive movement do not like the rise of the progressive netroots, the number one way to stymie its growth is to start winning campaigns. We wouldn't be so pissed off, active, and into "do-it-yourself" mode if we were winning. The netroots know what losing is like, and we have had enough of it…

It is important to remember that characterizing the entire three million strong progressive netroots community as all containing identical personality traits is at best crude generalization, and at worst grotesque, chauvinistic stereotype.

The whole thing is worth a read, as it's a very nice response to the increasingly frequently-invoked strawman of the netroots activist as a "frothing" maniac so steeped in self-assurety and self-righteousness that s/he has made him/herself blind to her/his own ignorance of "the way things really work." A generous person will attribute the compulsion to address us this way to ignorance on the part of those doing the addressing. A less generous person will view it as a convenient deflection of the criticisms being lobbed at well-paid strategists who haven't managed to eke out a win in quite some time. You can probably imagine which side of that particular fence I fall on. Ahem.

As for Klein's whining about being branded a "creepy, covert conservative," Digby handles that one deftly.

(The Huffington Post, TIME, MyDD, Hullabaloo; image via Tastes Like Chicken)

--> Sign up for Peek in your inbox... every morning! (Go here and check Peek box).

Melissa McEwan writes and edits the blog Shakespeare's Sister.