Blog Watch: The Blue Voice

I'm starting a new blogging series with this post. The series is entitled "Blog Watch," and it will provide periodic commentary on various blogs - big and small - that raise compelling issues of political importance or those that pose particular ideological challenges.

Here's what I plan to do: Every few weeks or so I'll put up a post commenting on a political blog that I see raising significant questions involving style, analysis, and ideological orientation. I'm particularly interested in dissecting and challenging radical, antiwar bloggers. As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I'm disgusted with rampant anti-Americanism, and especially that found in the left wing blogosphere. I intend to rebut such nihilist projects through my "Blog Watch" series.

I hope others will also pay more attention to smacking back down left-wing propaganda and nihilist discourse.

This week's entry dissects The Blue Voice, a hard-left blog which posted this YouTube a few weeks back (take a look at the video before preceding to my analysis below):

The Blue Voice is a group blog of writers on the left of the political spectrum. The blog's team members display some variation, but the overall theme is tremendous opposition to the Bush administration, and anything having to do with the war in Iraq or the robust forward role of the U.S. in international affairs.

Let me first say that the blog boasts a beautiful template, and I like the blog's title: There's something wholesome about the idea of a blue (inclusive, even Democratic) voice, speaking out for the interests of the globe. At least, that's what I see in the blog's aesthetic presentation.

My affinity pretty much stops right there, however. If you've viewed the video, you've now got an idea of the nihilist project that is mounted on that page. The worst of the team members is "Buddhagem," which is a pseudonym for Dave Buccola. Dave hasn't posted much to the blog lately, but when I visited the blog regularly early this year Dave posted often, usually entries of the most radical, America-bashing style imaginable.

Dave came to my blog one day out of the blue (no pun intended) and left a stinging attack on my posts. I told him that he'd have to write something intelligent, and quit with the name-calling, or I'd ban him. I did respond to his later remarks with thoughfulness - even friendliness - but he ended up going ballistic, denouncing me as a fascist.

He became so frustrated in his sheer impotence in rebutting my points intelligently (I had made the case for the American use of torture in handling enemy combatants), he ended up going over to my entry on RateMyProfessors.com (http://ratemyprofessors.com/) to leave a bogus review of my class:

He's a right-wing fascist who tries to push his views on the class....He's nothing more than a sad propagandist for the state.

I'm sure Dr. Sanity could figure this guy out, though I'd hazard to say he's got some big grievances over the structure of the American economy and the class system, not mention the deployment of any type of force in the resolution of conflicts. He's also got no ethics or integrity, but that's not uncommon among those whom I've encounted on the radical side.

Dave's not well-learned on the fundamentals of politics and international relations, so his writing's incoherent; in fact, his posts are downright rudimentary and unoriginal (Dave copies directly off Wikipedia in writing and animating his posts).

More substantial are the entries from Bruce Miller. Bruce is more intellectual, and his posts show considerable attention to historical detail. He's interested in the works of William Appleman Williams, who was a postwar revisionist historian who made the case for American responsiblity for the origins and dangers of the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union.

He also likes Gabriel Kolko, another historian of the revisionist school who has argued for an American project of global dominance, with anti-communism the central postwar guise for American expansionism.

The problem with these posts is that I've seen little attention to newer historical research which calls into question the central assumtions and findings of the hardline revisionist scholars (historians have settled on a "post-revisionist synthesis").

In any case, I haven't read too many posts from the other writers on the page (except Tankwoman, who's interesting to read, even if she's not grounded too much in reality). The blog overall is reflexively anti-Bush and exhibits many of the attributes of the most hardline Marxist-Leninist forces intent on bringing down the county. The writing is not the most sophisiticated or analytical, especially when compared to the slippery style of some of the bigger blogs found in the hard-left blogsphere (like FireDogLake).

Having said that, I still think that the vile stuff spewing off The Blue Voice should be vigorously rebutted. It's mostly anti-American diatribes, often under the slim veneer of pseudo-historical sophistication. Don't believe a word of it.