Karl Rove teed off this afternoon on the liberal netroots, the coalition of far-left blogs and advocacy groups who are a new power bloc in the Democratic party.
"The Web has given angry and vitriolic people more of a voice in public discourse," said Mr. Rove, who served as one of President Bush's top strategists until he resigned this past summer, and is a noted technology nut.
"People in the past who have been on the nutty fringe of political life, who were more or less voiceless, have now been given an inexpensive and easily accessible soapbox, a blog," Mr. Rove said during a speech about politics and the Web at the Willard InterContinental, a hotel just blocks from his former place of employment.
"I'm a fan of many blogs. I visit them frequently and I learn a lot from them," Mr. Rove said. "But there also blogs written by angry kooks."
Mr. Rove cited the results of a study that found that writers and commenters on liberal blogs such as DailyKos.com cursed far more than writers and commenters on conservative Web sites such as FreeRepublic.com.
"My point is not that liberals swear publicly more often than conservatives. That may be true, but that's not my point," Mr. Rove said. "It is that the netroots often argue from anger rather than reason, and too often, their object is personal release, not political persuasion."
I don't think the cursing bit is important, but he's absolutely right about their arguing from anger more than reason. He's also spot on about the fact that their rhetoric will turn off undecided/moderate voters. Hey, maybe this represents a trend! We had Bush (rather clumsily) taking on "
moveon.org bloggers", Lieberman
letting the netroots have it in his speech yesterday, and of course there was the
pitiful example of what happened to Pete Stark when he went on the floor of the House with his moonbat talking points in hand.
Think Progress!
