Biden mutters to himself, frets aloud about "getting in trouble," looks around worried/confused, and mutters to himself again.

Oh my Lord. This man is not well. pic.twitter.com/5UoEW90FD6

— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) March 6, 2024

I don't know if he's "not well" or if he's got something else bothering him, but would somebody please help him? Help us.

ADDED: The look on his face reminded of George W. Bush's "My Pet Goat" interlude. Maybe Biden doesn't want to upset the children. 

"From my perspective, the approach of the Democratic Party—and not just the Party itself, the rank-and-file Democrats and liberals—has been a singular mission to destroy Donald Trump..."

"... as though that will solve all problems. So when I see these indictments, whether all of them are correct or not, fair or not, I think the entire mind-set is, We are going to jail this man and destroy this man, and that will solve our problem...."

Said Peter Daou, quoted in "Peter Daou’s Theory of Election Interference—by Democrats/The former Clinton aide, now running the third-party Presidential campaign of Cornel West, on his recent political awakening" (The New Yorker).

"[Cornel West's] presence in the 2024 race gives voters an exceptional choice for truth and justice beyond the corrupt and corrosive duopoly."

"Democracy means choice, it means options for voters, not coronations and vote-shaming. It is long past time to practice democracy rather than just pay it lip service."

Said Peter Daou, quoted in "Cornel West for President announces the hiring of political activist, author, and adviser Peter Daou as Campaign Manager" (a press release from Cornel West).

"This Pro-Hillary Website Looks Like North Korean Agitprop/Peter Daou, the prickly pro-Clinton operative, has launched a propaganda rag so shameless it would make Kim Jong Un blush."

A Politico headline. The article is by Jack Shafer:

A couple of days ago, Daou launched his self-funded Verrit.com, a slavishly pro-Clinton site (endorsed by Hillary!) to carry on her failed crusade.

The derision greeting Verrit is so universal it inspires sympathy for Daou, as Gizmodo, the Washington Post, Outline, New Republic, New York, The Ringer and others have broken its back with their snap judgments. “Verrit, a Media Company for Almost Nobody,” read one headline. “No One Asked for Verrit, But Here We Are,” stated another. “What Is Verrit and Why Should I Care? (Unclear; You Shouldn’t.),” said a third. “Peter Daou Continues to Embarrass Hillary Clinton,” asserted the best in show.

I'm not going to do links for all those articles, nor am I going to read them. I'll just idly theorize that Democrats really want Hillary to go away (see the top link in my previous post). What's so awful about Verrit? Shafer says:

Imagine if Matt Drudge created a Hillary fan site, only instead of listing news stories in a text-heavy fashion, he arranged them on the Web equivalent of 3x5 cards, and in addition to typing headlines onto the cards, he pulled out salient facts and stats from the stories (called “verrits”). Each card carries a unique serial number that you can plug into the Verrit database to prove … well, I don’t know exactly what it proves other than Verrit drew its facts and stats from the news source cited.

It sounds like a fact-checking site — a politically activated fact-checking site like Vox. Right? Verrit is a portmanteau of ferret and verify, I presume. The site is ferreting out the truth, right? It's a truth weasel, and it skews pro-Hillary.

As Daou’s Verrit manifesto puts it, the site hopes to become the trusted sourced for the 65.8 million voters who cast their ballots last November for Clinton and who seek verified “facts” they can use to argue politics. In theory, everybody needs a cheat sheet. In practice, the Verrit method is cringe-worthy. The headline to one early Verrit borrows from the literary methods of Kim Jong Un’s North Korea to assert, “Hillary Democrats Are the Heart and Conscience of America.” Does anybody outside of the Daou re-education camp really think this way?...

Daou's response to the criticism was an all-caps tweet: “PEOPLE ARE STILL TERRIFIED OF HILLARY. PEOPLE STILL WANT TO DESTROY HILLARY. PEOPLE WANT TO SILENCE ANYONE WHO SUPPORTS HER.”

He's yelling about silencing. Who's terrified of Hillary now that she's lost the election? Mostly just Democrats who are hoping to pull something together for the next election. I don't think they want to silence "anyone who supports" Hillary. They just want Hillary to go away so they can channel the erstwhile Hillary supporters into something that still lives and breathes within the Democratic Party. It is terrifying though, because what could that be?

Why shouldn't Daou provide a place for the Hillary lovers to rest and recover and preserve visibility as a group, a group that is holding back and available to vote for a Democratic Party that represents her values — or the values that they perceive her to embody. It's not easy to remember what the were, so why shouldn't Daou shape and rewrite the myth and run forward into the world to tell the story, like Tom of Warwick at the end of "Camelot"?

Lawsuit goes after Arianna Huffington for stealing the idea for a website.

Politico reports:

“Huffington has styled herself as a ‘new media’ maven and an expert on the effective deployment of news and celebrity on the Internet in the service of political ends,” says the complaint. “As will be shown at trial, Huffington’s and Lerer’s image with respect to the Huffington Post is founded on false impressions and inaccuracies: They presented the ‘new media’ ideas and plans of Peter Daou and James Boyce as their own in order to raise money for the website and enhance their image, and breached their promises to work with Peter and James to develop the site together."...

Democrats need “to develop a dominant position within the Internet,” Daou said during an early meeting about the site, according to the complaint. “It is a system [for] pushing the message, not just for fundraising,” he allegedly said.

Huffington called the charge of stolen ideas and broken deals “a completely absurd, ludicrous supposition” from men whom she’d turned down for jobs on the site.

This might be interesting  — a stark presentation of the Huffington Post's political agenda. But, really, I'm not too impressed with this notion of stealing "the idea" for a business. Was there a contract or a partnership or not? And it's not much of an idea anyway — a "dominant" website with a political slant. The trick is to do it well and get the traffic. Anyone could try to do it. Huffington did it. Possibly because she picked the right people to work with, and it wasn't Boyce and Daou.

The lawsuit touches on the same legal frontiers of intellectual property and deal-making as did a famous lawsuit Facebook settled in 2008. The success of the suit, which seeks unspecified damages, will hinge on whether Daou and Boyce can prove they had offered “something more specific than a generalized notion” and that Huffington had agreed to make them part of the deal, said Dan Kornstein, a prominent New York litigator.

What is the "more specific" thing? The complaint says the idea was for "a collective of blogs by notable personalities, non-partisan news aggregation, issue-specific web pages, scoops and exclusives derived from the founders’ personal relationships with Democratic Party and media insiders, and online community-building, with the purpose of driving Internet traffic and ‘page views’ for politically progressive messaging.” I'm not impressed.

Pursued by boobs.

Trying to get some distance from my opponents, who've been pursuing me all weekend, I nevertheless drop by the comments section of yesterday's "Comments, comments, comments" post to talk back to some character who proclaims me "demonstrably flayed" and another who demands "an apology just for [my] flawed logic without speaking to [my] bitter tongue." I say:

I continue to stand by my comments and to assert -- with ever increasing confidence -- that my opponents all have some combination of: poor reading skills, lack of a sense of humor, anti-feminism, calcified political hackitude. Moreover, they've got some scary blindness about the way to help poor Hillary Clinton, who was the whole reason they were wrangled into Bill's presence in the first place. Bumbling all weekend over Jessica's breasts? You people are boobs.

I mean, is this what Peter Daou hoped to achieve when he gathered those bloggers around Bill, supposedly -- I think -- to reward them for their faithful service shoring up Bill's tantrum over that ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11"?

Last week, the lefty bloggers maladroitly focused attention on the issue of whether Clinton mishandled the terrorism threat, which caused many people to watch a film they wouldn't have bothered with and to marshall the evidence that he, in fact, had screwed up. Then, the bloggers who performed that dubious service were lured by lunch in the presence of the ex-president, and when they went back to their blogs and enthused about his blue eyes and how delightfully charmed they were by his aura and, doing so, provoked a tiny sprinkle of mockery, they flipped out for days on end. Their freak out just got everyone talking about Bill's old sex problems again.

As they cranked up into a higher and higher pitch -- doing their damnedest to show Bill they really, really like him -- they let loose with the most horrendous sexist and ageist slurs, laying them open to the unanswerable charge that they are political hacks at heart whose commitment to feminism is thoroughly laughable.

The boob-blogging continues apace. You've got to wonder what they'll bobble into next.

IN THE COMMENTS: We talk about an image that I say I couldn't find. Many months later I see it here.

Let's take a closer look at those breasts.

NOTICE: You are about to read a post that has been widely linked and discussed on various blogs, and I suspect that you are not inclined to read this post carefully or with any sympathy toward what I intended. So, I'm adding this note to make it more likely that you will understand what I am trying to say. First, I am writing from a feminist perspective, even though I am criticizing a feminist. Second, the "breasts" referred to in the heading are the drawings and photographs of breasts that a feminist blogger sees fit to decorate her blog with. I don't like that. Third, the real target of this post is Bill Clinton. I think Clinton betrayed feminism (and I hate the way many feminists have given him a pass). Fourth, this post is written in a humorous, cutting style. It's meant to hurt, but I am attacking public figures about an important issue.

What follows after the asterisks is the original post.

***

I wanted to elevate a discussion from the comments section of a post from Wednesday, you know the one with the photo of the Daou-wrangled bloggers posing in front of Bill Clinton? The first commenter, Goesh, picks up on my prompt -- "Let's just array these bloggers... randomly" -- and wisecracks: "Who is the Intern directly in front of him with the black hair?"

Eventually, Jessica from a blog called Feministing, shows up and says: "The, um, 'intern' is me. It's so nice to see women being judged by more than their looks. Oh, wait..."

Snarky but somewhat conciliatory, I say: "Well, Jessica, you do appear to be 'posing.' Maybe it's just an accident."

Jessica Feministing returns and says:

It's a picture; people pose. And I'm not sure I understand your logic anyway. If I "pose" for a picture (as opposed to sulking and hunching over?) then I deserve to be judged for my looks? I don't see anyone talking shit about the other bloggers smiling pretty for the camera.

Provoked, I decide to actually give her a small dose of the kind of judgment for brains she seems to demanding:

Jessica: I'm not judging you by your looks. (Don't flatter yourself.) I'm judging you by your apparent behavior. It's not about the smiling, but the three-quarter pose and related posturing, the sort of thing people razz Katherine Harris about. I really don't know why people who care about feminism don't have any edge against Clinton for the harm he did to the cause of taking sexual harrassment seriously, and posing in front of him like that irks me, as a feminist. So don't assume you're the one representing feminist values here. Whatever you call your blog....

Making this colloquy into this new blog post, I actually click over to Jessica's blog, and what the hell? The banner displays silhouettes of women with big breasts (the kind that Thelma and Louise get pissed off at when they're seen on truck mudflaps). She's got an ad in the sidebar for one of her own products, which is a tank top with the same breasty silhouette, stretched over the breasts of a model. And one of the top posts is a big closeup on breasts.

Sooooo... apparently, Jessica writes one of those blogs that are all about using breasts for extra attention. Then, when she goes to meet Clinton, she wears a tight knit top that draws attention to her breasts and stands right in front of him and positions herself to make her breasts as obvious as possible?

Well, I'm going to assume Jessica's contributions to my comments are an attempt at a comic performance, as was her attendence at the luncheon dressed in the guise of Monica Lewinsky. Lord knows we need more comical feminists.

Or are you going to say she's some kind of Karl Rove plant? Alternatives: She's a clueless fool. She's in it for the money. (And you know the blog money is all in the T-shirts.)

UPDATE: You know what? If you breastblog and someone calls you on it, just laugh. If you try to deny it, people will laugh at you. Case in point? The big comments thread herein. I'm not saying you should read all the stuff in there, even though some of it's funny (and it could be useful as raw material for a Women's Studies master's thesis), but really, denial is some serious quicksand. And thanks to Glenn for linking. Quoting the title of this post unleashed some serious Instalanche action. (I knew it would.) The most ever, actually. And late on a Friday! What are you going to do? Guys love breasts. I think Jessica knows that quite well. And I think for all her gasping outrage, she's thoroughly pleased to get this attention. And as for you chumps who spent the afternoon defending her... well, you're chumps. So am I for giving her the publicity.... but what the hell? It's Friday.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This post has gotten a lot of links from folks who profess "puzzlement." I think a lot of this puzzlement is willful blindness to the criticism of Clinton.

Job title: Blog Advisor!

Peter Daou signs off over at Salon, as he leaves to serve Hillary Clinton as "a blog advisor to facilitate and expand her relationship with the netroots." Take note, bloggers! That's a new job description, and you qualify! Blog Advisor, facilitating and expanding relationships with the netroots.
Is it too late to complain about the word "netroots"? It should be two words. I'm seeing troots too much. Or could we just shorten it to troots, which is cute? Cute troots.

Wait. Back to the subject. I keep meaning to quote some of Daou's statement, but it's boring me terribly for some reason. Does something happen to a blogger when he goes on the payroll of a politician? Don't you read bloggers because they're independent? Once they're bound to a specific candidate, what the hell are they?

They are Blog Advisor, facilitating and expanding relationships with the netroots. But we bloggers are prickly, feisty characters. You can't facilitate and expand with me.

Okay, focus:

The past few months have been a challenging period in the growth of the blogosphere, with the YearlyKos convention marking the “arrival” of the blogs as a political force (at least in the eyes of many mainstream reporters and political operatives). But YearlyKos has also touched off a series of harsh attacks against the netroots and specifically Daily Kos and its founder Markos Moulitsas. As blog influence continues to grow, we can expect more intense fire directed at the blogosphere by those who have a vested interest in undermining it.

One of the standard practices of blog detractors is to use the comments of the anonymous few to tarnish the genuine passion and sincerity of the many millions who log on to express their views and to connect with other denizens of the Internet. The “angry left” is a stereotype used to pigeonhole left-leaning bloggers, but the truth is that far from being a bastion of ideological rigidity, the blog world is a hard-hitting and free-wheeling discussion among Americans of all political stripes. These attacks won’t weaken the community; on the contrary, this nascent power base is only beginning to make its presence felt. It will reach fuller potential with the participation of Democratic leaders and responsible reporters.

That's turgid and in need of translation. I'm thinking it's a rephrasing of his pitch to the Clinton campaign about why they need him. Kos and his ilk are a threat, storming the gates, and they need someone who can deal with them, talk to them, tame them.

IN THE COMMENTS: They're playing with the "troots." Example: The troots? You can't handle the troots!

MORE: Amba makes a key point: "'Troots' would be a construction exactly analogous to 'blog' (ne-troots, we-blog)." I kept trying to think of other examples of forming a word like that, and the only thing I could think of was "shrooms."

Hillary hires a blogger.

The NYT reports:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has hired Peter Daou, one of the most prominent political bloggers in the nation, to help disseminate her message in a forum that has not always been that hospitable to her....

The Clinton camp is clearly counting on Mr. Daou, who directed blog outreach and online rapid response for Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004, to help improve Mrs. Clinton's image among liberal bloggers, who are fast becoming a constituency in their own right and may thus play a significant role in selecting the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

Nowadays, you have to hire a blogger to fend off the bloggers. This blogging game is playing out nicely.

ADDED: Glenn Reynolds collects links -- including to this post -- on the blogging conspiracy theme. I especially enjoyed BloggingHeads. What makes the Wright/Kaus split screen so fascinating? It's that they don't have that look people get on TV. Especially Kaus. I love the way -- in the beginning -- he's just sticking his tongue halfway out as he's concentrating on Wright's intense discussion of the Kosola time line. Is he intentionally acting like a guy who doesn't know anyone's looking at him or is he just a guy who isn't thinking about how anyone's looking at him?

[Correction made: The word "don't" was missing in the added paragraph. I hope that was obvious. Sorry.]