Enemy of the Ruling Class

Did Chris Matthews actually ask Ned Lamont about a group he calls the "pajamahadeen"? Marty Kaplan at HuffPo says he did:

Chris Matthews to Ned Lamont on MSNBC today: What do you think of the pajamahadeen?

Lamont: Huh?

Matthews: The bloggers. They roll out of bed in the morning, they read something in the paper, they blog about it, they talk to each other about it, people blog back, and pretty soon it becomes the buzz.

(Caveat lector: It's my paraphrase, not a transcript.)

Bloggers are the enemy of the traditional media. (I learned that one personally last week) One of its leading lights (albeit a dim bulb) calling bloggers a phrase synonymous with Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists should hammer that home. Of course, they fear us. They fear the democratization of media. They fear market share. They fear multiple voices. They fear the fact that we've caught on to what they do for a living, and we do it better:

It's funny: the entire District of Columbia is built on the exact same process that Chris Matthews describes, except that instead of people using keyboards, they use phones, and instead of blogging, they use their access to print and broadcast media, and to one another.

I lived and worked in politics and journalism in Washington for eight years, and every day, the inviolable morning ritual was that people read the papers, they watched television, and then all day long they called one another to ask, "What do you hear?" The biggest difference between the daily routine of the Beltway chattering class and the blogosphere is that the Gang of 500 (as The Note calls them) has been replaced by the dispersed and inherently more small-d democratic netroots.

They just don't want anybody else getting in on their scam. They don't want to be made irrelevant. In truth, they already are. The chattering class hasn't realized that there's more of us talking amongst ourselves than there are people watching them talk amongst themselves.

This should be a fun election season. Cokie and Chris and the gang are going to need smelling salts to get through it.