Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

Is that the sound of scales falling from eyes I hear?

Seems that a few of the Big Boi Bloggers who have wholeheartedly and uncritically embraced Barack Obama* are a wee bit upset that he appeared on Faux this Sunday and didn’t “take them on” as one of his advisers had told Greg Sargent he would, in order to silence the critics (on the blogs) who were taking him to task for appearing on the network and thus legitimizing it.

Sargent (all emphasis mine):

To be clear, Obama wasn’t obliged to go after Fox. But a senior adviser said Obama would, as a way of quieting criticism of him. And he didn’t.

This will likely further dismay liberal bloggers who had worked very hard to get Dems to boycott Fox as a way of deligitimizing the network and who already criticized Obama for agreeing to appear in the first place.

Obama turned in a perfectly solid performance. He probably succeeded in making a positive impression on many voters he might otherwise not have reached. But the broadcast was clearly a big victory for Fox and Chris Wallace, too.

Matt Stoller:

Greg Sargent’s blog post ‘Obama Doesn’t “Take Fox On,” After All’ kind of says it all. Obama is sucking up to Fox News, and beyond that, the campaign operative who said he would just out and out gave false information.

You can’t trust the Obama campaign, they will lie to you to promote right-wing institutions.

And later, in another diary:

It is very difficult to acknowledge that your candidate deals with you in bad faith, and so I understand the emotional inability of Obama’s most ardent supporters to realize that is what happened. I am an Obama supporter, but I don’t think he’s particularly trustworthy. The issue at hand is that Obama’s campaign simply gave out false information to Greg Sargent to placate bloggers. . . .

I think lost in all this nonsense is just how weakened we [Liberal blogs] have become in all this. When we accept lies from our leaders and openly dismissive knocks from them, it destroys our core argument that Democrats need to have integrity and to stand up for themselves. No they don’t. We don’t stand up for ourselves and we let them lie to us without consequence

Why should they listen to us when we ask them to do something we won’t do for ourselves? There’s probably no point in making this argument, but if I reach one person hopefully it will be useful. When you say that your voice doesn’t matter, it doesn’t. When you enable bad behavior, unethical behavior, it continues. I’m sorry, but the Iraq war happened for this reason. Silence.

If you don’t like that Obama steps on you, speak out. Clinton at least has a reason to step on us since many of us have openly called her a Republican. It’s a fight, and we didn’t back her. Instead we back someone that openly lies to us and thinks nothing of it. Worse still, there are no consequences, only criticism of people who are Obama backers but are frustrated at being lied to. I remember this situation during the Clark campaign, when I was attacked for speaking out about the campaign’s mistakes, until he lost a campaign run with ghoulish incompetence.

It was a mistake for us to endorse Obama, just as it was a mistake for us to do nothing against Clinton after she accused Moveon of intimating her supporters at caucuses. We should be stuffing ads discussing her Bosnia sniper fire in Indiana. But we don’t believe in standing up for ourselves.

So go ahead, accept the lies. It seems to be what we want from our leaders, and so I suppose it’s what we are going to continue to get.

Aw. He sounds so dejected to find out that Obama is, in fact, a politician. I could almost feel sorry for him. Except that he’s been one of the main contributors to the toxic environment on liberal blogs in the past few months, in which anyone who raises criticism of Obama gets shouted down, astroturfed, threatened, mocked, driven out. And you’ll note that even in his depressed and disillusioned state, he manages to get a few digs in at Clinton.

In an update, Stoller links to this post by Lambert at Correntewire which points out that during the interview, Obama specifically threw Daily Kos under the bus. Which shouldn’t be such a shock to these guys, since he’s done it before.

I admit, I’m having a schadenfreudelicious moment here. After having been pointedly and personally savaged for perceived support of Clinton just because I asked a few people to look at the rules they were insisting she was disregarding, let alone for pointing out that his rhetoric about choice and women’s autonomy makes me veryveryvery nervous, I have little sympathy for anyone who bought into the mass delusion that Obama was some kind of new politician (Everything you’d hoped for and more!  Going to bring Unity and Change and Hope to the electorate in some undefined way!) and who, in defense of their delusion bullied and intimidated anyone who criticized Obama (or asked to see his progressive bona fides or who simply didn’t vote for him (damn those racist Archie Bunkers who want to hear about issues! There’s Hope and Change to be had!)).

Still, I’m glad to see that some of these guys are beginning to come to their senses. Hear-no-evil, See-no-evil and Speak-no-evil is not the way to handle legitimate criticism of your candidate, nor is attacking anyone who dares to criticize as out of touch, old, a bitch, a racist, what have you. Candidates *must* be evaluated on their merits, and you can’t evaluate someone on their merits if any and all criticism is greeted with, “LALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU, YOU OLD BITTER RACIST BITCH!!!!

The next few weeks should be interesting. I’ve been suspecting that the longer the primary dragged on, the less able some of the Big Boiz would be to maintain their unqualified and uncritical support of Obama, particularly if he wasn’t winning all the time. No wonder they’ve been in such a rush to put an end to the primary.

Edited for atrocious grammar and run-on sentences.  _______

* Just to be clear: I’ve got no problem at all with people who support Obama. However, if they do so uncritically, and when asked for a reason why they support him, stammer something about hope and change and what a great progressive he is — and he promised a pony! — before launching into a diatribe about how awful Hillary Clinton is, then I reserve the right to mock their gullibility. As here.