IF THE STAKES WEREN'T SO SMALL THE SPAT WOULD BE MORE FUN:

Excommunicated: DAILY KOS STRIKES AGAIN (Jonathan Chait, 06.22.06, TNR Online)

I realize that the new, counterintuitive thing to say about the left blogosphere these days is that it's not really that radical. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga says nice things about Mark Warner, which means he's really just a pragmatist (or easily co-opted, but the effect is the same). All this is mostly true. What this interpretation misses, however, is that the radicalism of the lefty bloggers lies not so much in their ideological platform but in their ideological style. They think like sectarians. And that style is on perfect display in Kos's attack on The New Republic.

Kos announces in his headline, "TNR's defection to the Right is now complete." If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because it is. More than two years ago, Kos launched what he called his "anti-TNR campaign," in which he declared us to be enemies of the people. Wait, sorry, wrong jargon--I meant, enemies of the people-powered movement.

You just know the disputants want to pull each others' hair.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 22, 2006 9:56 PM