The real plumbers are those few right wingers who will not give up: looking for any filth that might successfully percolate on Drudge or similar places, smearing Obama.
Wading for a few minutes through the sewage of these Web sites reminds me uncannily of the time I’ve spent having political discussions in certain living rooms and coffee shops in Baghdad. The mental atmosphere is exactly the same—the wild fantasies presented as obvious truth, the patterns seen by those few with the courage and wisdom to see, the amused pity for anyone weak-minded enough to be skeptical, the logic that turns counter-evidence into evidence and every random piece of information into a worldwide conspiracy. Above all, the seething resentment, the mix of arrogance and impotent rage that burns at the heart of the paranoid style in politics.
The problem isn’t lack of education—it’s that of a self-isolating political subculture gone rancid.
[From Interesting Times: George Packer: Online Only: The New Yorker]
I shudder to think of what these losers will be doing in the first year of an Obama administration. I thought the Clinton pillory was bad enough.