Blogoland

This piece in USA Today really has to be the silliest and most incoherent thing I've ever read on blogging.

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.

Hey, well, that's probably about right. He types on...

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.

Wha??!! So a sitting U.S. Senator and former Vice Presidential candidate is defeated by a heretofore unknown long shot, but because the defeated U.S. Senator decides to run as an Independent, it's a loss for Blogtopia.

Because....

“There isn't much point in detailing the chest thumping of the various blognut extremists,” wrote Time's Joe Klein in his analysis of the Lamont victory. “Their reach is minuscule.”

So if I understand the argument correctly: A long-shot candidate winning a primary with the help of the blogs doesn't matter because I say so. And those blog people are all nuts anyway, says Joe Klein, so just ignore them.

And yes, there are obligatory references to Blogworld as a "screaming child" and that it needs to be "watched carefully." What a complete goofus.