we stil can’t really understand what usatoady (proud member of the mmm: the multi-millionaire media) is trying to do with this piece:

on aug. 8, connecticut businessman ned lamont defeated u.s. sen. joe lieberman in the democratic primary, a triumph widely credited to the rah-rah racket produced by pro-lamont armies stationed along the internet.

indeed, the bloggers had scored big. they had helped vault a local politician to national prominence and cemented the iraq war as issue no. 1 in the congressional elections. not a bad day.

but their victory was short-lived. even before the primary, lieberman announced that, should he lose, he’d still run in november as an independent. this electoral chutzpah effectively rope-a-doped the bloggers and recharged the senator’s fabled joe-mentum. lieberman’s still the man to beat in the general election.

if this wasn’t enough to drain the effervescence from the blogger bubbly, america’s noisy web wags were dealt an even more sobering blow 10 days later when snakes on a plane opened nationwide to a decidedly flat $15.3 million box office.

that’s right. apparently because ’snakes on a plane’ under-performed (in the eyes of the people who, for no logical reason, assumed it would be a smash box office blockbuster; none of those people were bloggers), that alone proves ned lamont is running a fool’s errand.

somehow author bruce kluger contorts logic and adult standards of thought into such pretzled positions that the box office receipts for an admittedly-bad b movie is reflective of what citizens want from their politicians. and the people that listen to what other people write about same on their blogs are nuts to do so.

we don’t even want to get into the specific logic oxymorons within bruce’s piece. such as this opening sentence to one of his paragraphs:

lieberman’s boomerang reminds us that voters represent a meager percentage of the total populace — and that bloggers are an even tinier subset of that group.

uh, bruce, in an election, voters are the only ones who count. the larger set of “people, including those who don’t vote,” doesn’t really factor into whether lieberman or lamont get elected.

does it?

we’re not sure.

bruce may have a point, but he mangles it badly. to be sure, anyone who thought they could predict the future by reading the blogs is an idiot. just as anyone who thought they could predict the future by reading gop talking points is an idiot.

the problem, bruce, is that “journalists” today like to read things and predict the future, insted of getting off their butts and investigating and analyzing and comparing and presenting their findings to the ameircan public. it’s so much easier to read someone else’s opinions and then make fun of them when those opinions don’t match the over-hyped imagined results you ascribed to them.

in a nutshell, which is where this article belongs, to liken lamont’s run against lieberman to the opening of a purposefully-bad summer flick (#1 for the week, may we remind you) would be like saying “hey, david brooks really liked ‘cinderella man,’ which was kind of bad, so why should we listen to what he has to say about iraq?” granted, brooks has no taste or logic, but only someone with an advanced case of adhd would assume a causal relationship between his foreign policy expertise and his taste in movies.

but, towards the end of bruce’s piece, we actually get a glimpse of what really underlies the whole screed. once again, the green-eyed monster raises its ugly head:

ever since the first smarty-pants posted his first unsolicited opinion on the internet, americans have become captivated by blog-o-mania — for good reason. for once, we own and operate our own public medium. power to the people. vox populi. yadda-yadda.

yes, bruce wishes that even one tenth of the people who read dkos and fdl (and even skippy on the american street) on a daily basis would read him and hold his words in high regard.

you may want to write bruce and remind him that the “people” to whom the power is going are the same folks who read his rag, so he may want to avoid insulting them in the future.

yada yada.

addendum: for further yada yada, check out ntodd and kieran healy.

double addendum: and the real ugly american puts in his two ugly cents, as does outside james joyner on outside the beltway.