Jeffrey Goldberg on the Democrats

There was an article in the 29 May 2006 New Yorker about the Democrats' hopes of making inroads in the coming elections. It's full of the usual right-wing-narrative-spin cliches - Dean getting angry, Teresa Kerry being out of touch with the heartland - but "he singled out Diebold, a favorite target of bloggers whose rage against the Bush Administration seems limitless" surely takes the cake. It's an extraordinarily weak constuction - clearly a comma is needed after "bloggers" to keep it from referring to a possibly miniscule set, but then it would seem to apply to all bloggers, which can't be right, and "seems limitless" is as close to meaningless as something clearly meaning "I think they're deranged" can be. I wonder how this got past the New Yorker's editors - the failure of the sentence is so clear, and so clearly a failure of thought. My guess is that the published phrasing is an unhappy compromise between Goldberg and his editor, the former wanting to include a full-out slam against people critical of his 100% CW viewpoint, the latter trying to minimize the damage to the magazine's credibility.

Anyway, it's not up on the web, which is probably just as well for articles written by reporters whose idiocy and credulity for DLC spin seems limitless.


p.s. Apparently Josh Marshall is planning on ripping into it.

update: via JMM, the article in question. Interestingly, this interview/rehash at the New Yorker strikes me as being not as bad.