To: Calitics Commissar David Dayen
From: Useful Idiots Phil and Jerry
Re: Your infantile disorder
When we read your hissy fits about Calbuzz’s coverage of the Parsky Commission, the words of Friedrich Engels came to mind:
“What childish innocence it is to present one’s own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument!”
(Programme of the Blanquist Communards)
As regular readers of Calitics, we admire your passion, if not your common sense. But let’s be clear that our mission at Calbuzz is quite different than the ideological ranting that is your stock in trade: it’s called “journalism.”
Let’s be blunt: You knew bupkus about the maneuvering and politics unfolding behind-the-scenes at the tax commission until we started covering it. To attack us for digging out the story is to mistake the map for the territory, using the same kind of tiresome, rigid, WATB ideological projections as you decry in the Yacht Party.
Unlike you, we don’t pretend, to ourselves or anyone else, that we know enough about economics, tax policy or public finance to lecture our readers about such matters or tell them What Is To Be Done. (You don’t either, but we’ll leave that between you and your comrades for your next self-criticism session.)
We see our job as ferreting out the facts of what’s going on politically with policy-makers; with all due respect to our MSM and online colleagues, there simply hadn’t been a hard look at the commission’s work, and the strategies behind it, before we started reporting on it a few weeks ago.
That you would have remained clueless about what was happening there, and would therefore have nothing to throw your little temper tantrum about, is to underscore the huge difference between the Calbuzz brand of political reporting and what Lenin would call the left-wing “infantile disorder” that defines Calitics.
As you’ll recall, this fundamental contradiction came fully into view at the Democratic convention, when your netroots pals couldn’t stop slobbering over Barbara Boxer at her press conference, while we old guys just did that old boring thing of asking her hard questions.
We’re just sayin’.
P.S. We’ll leave to others the task of analyzing your obsessive use of the words “fetish” “fetishism” and “fetishistic,” which is probably a matter best dealt with in therapy. You might consider asking our in-house political psychiatrist, Dr. P.J. Hackenflack, for some help.
