Jim: I hate to change the topic from hot women, but there’s something really fascinating going on in the left half of the blogosphere. A little background - last year Paul Hackett, an Iraq war vet (good!) who talked like Michael Moore (bad!) ran for an open House seat in a very Republican district. He lost, 52-48, but for a Democrat, that was a pretty solid result. Anyway, lefty bloggers including the gang at Daily Kos saw Hackett as a hero, and foresaw a great future for him.

This year, GOP Senator Mike DeWine is up for reelection. The Ohio Republican Party has had some scandals and problems lately, and DeWine could concievably be vulnerable. So the Democrats are watching this race closely. Hackett entered, and then a Democratic House member, Sherrod Brown, entered two days later. That set up a primary fight, and it looked like it could get ugly. Well, Hackett dropped out yesterday. The Times reported:

“This is an extremely disappointing decision that I feel has been forced on me,” said Mr. Hackett, whose announcement comes two days before the state’s filing deadline for candidates. He said he was outraged to learn that party leaders were calling his donors and asking them to stop giving and said he would not enter the Second District Congressional race. “For me, this is a second betrayal,” Mr. Hackett said. “First, my government misused and mismanaged the military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to support candidates like me.”

And in light of this news, the lefty blogosphere is about one pro-firearms policy away from a civil war. Really, read the comments on Kos, MyDD and Atrios. Some, including Kos himself, see Hackett’s withdrawal from the race as good news for the party. Many of his commenters are crazy with rage at what they see as a betrayal of one of the Democratic party’s rising stars, and accuse Kos of becoming a sellout. Seriously, one commenter compared him to Karl Rove.

Cam will have some comments about Kos later, but for now, I want to focus a bit on the entire tone of the discussion on these lefty blogs and chat boards. I know I can’t stand them, but that’s not all that surprising; I disagree politically with 90 percent of what they say. What I can’t figure out is… how these people stand each other! Really, any disagreement automatically turns into the nastiest, personal pissing contest. “You’re a sellout! No, you’re a sellout! Screw you! You’re thinking like a Republican! You don’t care about winning races!” Bla bla bla bla bla bla bla. Everyone seems touchy, quick to accuse, quick to take offense, furious with anger, willing to announce that they’re leaving the Democratic party at the drop of a hat… And of course, they use profanity more often than punctuation.

Do people really like that environment?

Cam: Jim will appreciate this reference. I kind of see Kos as the Darth Maul of the lefty blogosphere. Sure, he looks cool, but he says absolutely nothing, does nothing of great importance, and is easily defeated (by a Jedi padawan, no less!). Why do people hold him in such high esteem? I don’t think he’s backed a winning candidate yet, and I think his commentors are starting to realize that Kos is just as addicted to power as those he seeks to remove from power.

As one of his commentors said in the Hackett thread:

Kos is a complete sellout.
It was fun while it lasted I suppose.

Hey, Kos, how’s it feel to be a cog in the machine?

Your whorish revisionist history doesn’t play here.

Christ, you are as bad as Scotty.

We have always been at war with Eurasia, eh?

At the very least, Kos has to be worried about what this means for the book sales. At most, Kos should be worried about what this means for his status as Netroots King. He’s managed to convince a surprising number of powerful people that he, in fact, has power over the masses. Now they seem to be turning on him. It’s kind of fun to watch, actually.

I was talking with Glenn about his new book at CPAC over the weekend, and I pointed out that even an “Army of Davids” needs a general. Reading what’s going on with Kos and the other lefty bloggers, I can’t help but wonder if we’re not seeing a mutiny among the troops.

Jim: I liked this assessment over at QandO by a commenter named Billy:

They say the best way the learn a foreign language is full immersion. Apparently there is a similar dynamic working on the leftist blogs.

Posters there talk a lot about how they can’t get along with their families because of their political leanings. They often say they’ve ended friendships because of politics. And I’ve seen a number of posts on places such as DU with the general theme of “If I didn’t have the folks on this forum to talk to, I don’t know what I’d do.”

Many of those posters have gone from the heterogenous real world into practically living in the the homogenous leftist universe of those blogs and forums. (At least their intellectual life is lived there.)…

The self-segration focuses their dissent into rage. They begin to see themselves as a persecuted minority, pressed down by “the man”, which for them consists of corporate power and lackies of the corporations in politics. They even feel the mainstream media is against them and in favor of the corporate state, which alone tells you a lot about the depths of their delusions.

They are so emotionally convinced of their rightness that they become similarly convinced that a majority of people would agree with them, if “the man” didn’t work so hard to delude the common person. Then, with every election providing objective evidence that the common person does not, in fact, agree with them, they withdraw even further from reality and start to even feel anger at the common voter for being so “stupid”.

Most people are not put together to experience anger constantly and continuously. So those who are not so disposed to anger are more likely to drift away, leaving a core of folks for whom anger is their defining characteristic.

We all know about decisions made in anger. They are seldom good ones. Imagine being part of a group in which every decision is made in anger.

That strikes me as a pretty accurate assessment of the dynamic over at some of those blogs.