“Self-Righteous Delusion”

You know you’ve become a partisan hack when the press publishes a negative story related to Howard Dean, and your kneejerk reaction is to blame the GOP or … Joe Lieberman.

True to form, Oliver Willis uses this typically terse post to tag the network news as biased against Dean. Apparently, Willis doesn’t understand that the term “frontrunner” carries a bigger media spotlight.

(Willis, who dumped John Edwards in mid-2003 to join the Dean groupies, has a history of shifting with the partisan winds. As the Democratic Party’s liberal core becomes more LaRouche-like, Willis has kept up with the trend, posting the thoughtless commentary they crave and cramming more blog ads onto his site in the process.)

What’s happened at OWillis is only a small example of the increasingly freepish nature of what used to be havens for sensible dialogue. Check the comment threads at Daily Kos. The blog, formerly an enlightening resource for horse-race politics, has turned into an umbrella site for semi-coherent rants by petulant lemmings.

Yesterday CBS rejected an ad by MoveOn.org, sticking to its long-standing policy against running issue ads during the Super Bowl. Willis decried the action as “turn[ing] away money to appease the powers that be.”

Some of his loyal readers subsequently pledged to boycott the Super Bowl.

Go figure.