Aren’t blogs fascinating ?

To use a Stars Wars analogy again, it’s like watching Jabba the Hut grow up.

I still remember going to the Yglesias blog on Atlantic Monthly and being blown away by how all the postings were thoughtful and intelligent. It doesn’t have to be “splash and trash”, the term Shaun Kennedy uses.

I noted that his site is talking about organizing as a political force. I went back to Atlantic Monthly and found they are organizing their blogs too. The point to all this being that maybe blogs will not be mere internet oddities in the future, but democracy in action.

Some might argue they already are critical. If so, on my lowly level, have not noticed it. I think candidates pay lip service to Youtube, Myspace, Wikipedia, Google, and influential blogs, but that’s all. They pay attention not to thinktanks but to the lobbyists that go with the thinktanks. Lobbyists get a lot of attention.

Talk radio and Hollywood are still big, because even though big ideas might matter to the political operatives (although I wonder even about that), the dummies vote just as often, and their ideas are neither all bad nor unimportant to the operatives. Plus, it would be a mistake to blindly assume everyone who listens to Hollywood or talk radio is either unintelligent or uninformed.

What you see right now is perhaps chaos turning into something more organized. I just hope special interests (money) does not take over blogs the same way it takes over everything else. We have too many people doing our thinking for us already. One slim advantage mainstream media still keeps is the need for fact checking. Bloggers are not required to be correct on their sources or their facts. Anything goes, and sometimes does.

Given the present state of the VA GOP, maybe Shaun should be fired. The awful PR generated by party officials and politico losers, such as G.Allen, display an incompetence second to none.

Unfortunately, there is no one left for which to vote.