The Daily Brew

[trof]

© January 9, 2004
No Longer A Cool Kid

As some of you know, I started this little page long before most of
today's popular bloggers. More than a year before the 2000 election, I
was getting 8,000 hits a day. Of course, that was back in the days
before Media Whores Online took to the internet, before anyone had ever
heard of Atrios, Kos, or Tbogg; and well before the Democratic
Underground ever published a single headline. It was easy getting
people to read my stuff then. There simply weren't that many
alternatives.

The lack of anything except the corporate anti-Clinton spin machine
was, of course, the main reason I started writing this page. But
despite my "first mover" advantage, all of these fine sites have long
since left me in the dust. Which is actually fine by me. Since I have
more fun reading other people's work than writing my own, I have
happily become an infrequent, if somewhat less widely read,
commentator. I no longer check, or even keep, statistics on the site,
but I doubt I get even 8 hits per day any more. Still, I have to
wonder how I could have squandered my early lead so thoroughly.

The obvious answers are somehow unsatisfactory. Sure, my writing is
third rate, while the competition is top notch. And while real sites
crank out commentary on an hourly basis, my updates are few and far
between. The only thing "daily" about "the brew" is its name. But I
can't accept the idea that putting out poorly written trash on a
sporadic schedule isn't enough to win legions of fans. Happily, David
Brooks of the New York Times has given me a better explanation. See, I
am a "conspiracy theorist" and therefore unacceptable in polite
company.

Since the attacks of 9/11, I have argued off and on that this event,
the defining moment of Bush's tenure in the White House, was also
Bush's electoral Achilles heel. I brazenly suggested that Democrats
should confront Bush on the failures that led to that fateful day. As
the months turned to years, and it became increasingly obvious that
this wasn't going to happen, like the rest of the media, I admit I more
or less moved my focus to the Iraq war. After all, it was the next
great national security blunder of the Bush administration, and
attacking Bush on Iraq had become a fairly accepted practice. So, with
American soldiers dying in an effort to rid Iraq of weapons of mass
destruction that never existed, I resigned myself to the fact that the
leaders of the Democratic Party were either incapable or unwilling to
make an issue of September 11, and I had become a pariah for ever
suggesting that they do otherwise.

The fact that the Bush administration was warned about the 9/11 attacks
by multiple sources, that prior to the attacks the Bush administration
took numerous actions that made them more likely, that the attacks were
almost certainly preventable, and that the people who failed to prevent
them are still employed in the same jobs by the Bush administration,
and the fact that the administration has done everything in its power
to hide all of this from the American public, was apparently not
something that could sway public opinion. Or, apparently, so thought
people who are far more influential than I.

More popular internet pundits, the kind who are invited to chatrooms
with Wesley Clark, or who get mentioned by people like Howard Kurtz on
the cable TV or in the corporate press, understand that the mere
suggestion that Bush all but invited the 9/11 attacks puts you in a
media imposed "sanity quarantine." So, while many are willing to point
out that Bush lied repeatedly to justify his invasion of Iraq, few are
willing to pick at the scab of the event that gave him the cover to
make those lies in the first place.

Instead, as Brooks and the "liberal" New York Times would suggest,
anyone who dares to say that Bush should bear responsibility for the
September 11 attacks (and the gall to carry it one step further and
consider the various motivations that might have led to the
catastrophic policies that allowed it to happen), thinks they are
getting messages through the fillings in their teeth. This view is so
pervasive in the corporate media, and consequently in the public mind,
that liberal bloggers, with their "amazon.com links" and "paypal
donation accounts" won't even discuss it. Since I won't let it go,
they get 80,000 hits a day and I don't.

I confess that I feel somewhat vindicated now that the Republican
chairman of the commission investigating the attacks is saying publicly
that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, and that the
people in the Bush administration who let it happen should have been
fired long ago, and that the Bush administration is still dragging its
feet on providing information for the investigation. But it really
doesn't matter. Judging from the non-reaction in the editorial pages
of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and more depressingly, the
left wing blogosphere, he is just another loony conspiracy theorist
like me.

That's life I guess. Move along people. Nothing to see here.

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