Posted on 01/16/2004 7:51:16 AM PST by TastyManatees
Josh Marshall Has Serious Chutzpah
Josh Marshall, author of the Talking Points Memo, has just gone a step too far, even for him. He is accusing Matt Drudge of coordinating his website postings on the DrudgeReport with the RNC...because Drudge's posts were similar to a speech on the same day given by the RNC's Chairman, Ed Gillespie.
Gasp!
Seriously, that's pretty sleazy, even for "Pope Josh I". He knows just as well as everyone else that during the news cycle, political actors and bloggers jump on the issues that are hot. He also knows that Drudge gets millions of readers a day, and is the 245th most popular website on the entire Internet! (As opposed to Marshall's own site, which is less popular by many orders of magnitude.) In fact many of Drudge's millions of visitors every day are Republicans, and pretty much everything big he posts becomes an instant topic for nationwide debate among them.
I don't like accusing people of hypocrisy, and it may be that Josh's little piece was not motivated by malice or strict defense of Party members, but instead his piece was a psychological defense mechanism called "displacement". Displacement is where you take out your anger or aggression on a less threatening target than the true target. I'm no psychologist, but Josh Marshall is widely known on the Hill to be nothing more than a press liaison for the Democratic Party leadership. Marshall's website is pretty much run by the minority leadership's staff and his fax number is on DNC's speed-dial. So, although Josh is angry and disgusted with himself for becoming such an intellectual joke, Josh is "displacing" his frustration at himself onto someone else because he can't come to terms with what he really is.
That takes chutzpah.
Just damn.
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"Sometimes, Marshall's rabid partisanship gets the better of his intellectual honesty. It's just that he's usually better at disguising it." --Andrew Sullivan
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