The Poutrage Lobby

Al Giordano has got it right. I’m sick of it, too, Al.

The Poutrage Lobby’s Modus Operandi is easy enough to follow, because they only have one move, and they do it again and again and again, they routinely do it as a circle jerk, and each time the story inevitably blows up in their faces.


Sometimes the order of the group grope changes, but it generally works something like it did with the Dodd story: Jane Hamsher posts a screed. Glenn Greenwald provides a slightly more academic version of it. Hamsher links back to Greenwald as the supposed ratifying authority. Then the Open Left boys repeat the story (their first headline was White House Throws Chris Dodd Under Bus to Protect Geithner and Summers), demand answers to rhetorical and loaded questions. And David Sirota predictably goes batshit road rage crazy making an activist call for the head of Tim Geithner on a stick. (The only player missing from this dance is Paul Krugman, who had the good luck to have his Monday Times column come out before he could jump on the three-wheeled bandwagon before another wheel fell off.) Repeat, rinse, pout. Repeat, rinse… pout.


And there’s a constituency for this type of garbage (which is not really that different than or morally superior to the Glen Beck or Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh inverse poutrages on the right): primarily some folks that supported Senators Clinton or Edwards in the primaries against Obama and, like Limbaugh, they “hope he fails.”

He forgot the “Common Dreams” readership constituency, Kucinich supporters. They are as actively sabotaging the Obama administration on the Internet as the Clintonistas or Edwardians, those of them who are doing it—they are all miserably bitter practitioners of poutrage, hoping against hope that Obama fails.