Cynical Nation

It hasn't been a good week for the left-hand side of the blogosphere. The Newsweek story about American interrogators flushing the Koran down the crapper and the ensuing riots had them smugly preening all weekend.

Even before the story of Newsweek's apology broke yesterday, there were Pentagon denials and mounting signs that at least a degree of skepticism might be warranted.

The bloggers were undeterred, however. That's why they never saw it coming when Newsweek's apology pulled the rug out from under them. That's why hyperpartisan lefty sites like Atrios and Daily Kos were reduced to ludicrous hair-splitting along the lines of, "Well, it was an apology, not a retraction..."

Now, however, Newsweek has officially retracted. Expect the lefty bloggers to react by trying to explain how the whole thing is either

• all Bush's fault
  
• an unimportant distraction from the real issue of blah blah blah...
  
• or planted by the Bush administration to divert attention from Bush's coke habit or Laura's standup routine or God knows what.
  

because the lefty blogs are as predictable and formulaic as Bill Bixby's "The Incredible Hulk" TV series. (Except, unlike that series, the bloggers spend almost all their time in perpetual Lou Ferrigno mode, mindlessly smashing things in a blind, incoherent rage.)

It's easy to be a lefty blogger. Never, ever depart from the following butt-simple rule set:

• All news stories that reflect favorably on Bush are lies.
  
• All news stories that reflect unfavorably on Bush are true.
  
• If a story that reflects badly on the president becomes questionable or problematic, it is still presumed true, no matter how much the story unravels, until even the faintest glimmer of the story's veracity is extinguished.
  
• If the anti-Bush story is demonstrated to be false, it was obviously planted by Karl Rove to discredit Bush's enemies.
  

And this is the so-called "reality based" community. Now this would be one thing if we were only talking about a few brain-rotted, tin-foil-hat-wearing, aged hippies with a Blogger account and a solar-powered internet connection. Sadly, however, it's much more than that. We're talking about the most public faces and prominent voices of the modern Democratic Party. Kos himself, Markos Zuniga, is not merely some anonymous blogger, but a highly valued and celebrated Democratic consultant. People like Kos and his fellow travelers at MoveOn.org represent the new ideological heart and soul of the Democratic Party, to the extent that such can even be said to exist.

Now to be fair, I have many Democratic friends (including my own wife) who are reasonable, rational, moderate people. They and their party are ill-served by the Michael Moore-Howard Dean-Kos-MoveOn-DU axis. I hope they can make their voices heard and assert their identity within a party that is becoming increasingly radicalized. The "Axis of Moonbats" is at least as big a threat to their party as the religious wackos are to my own.