Firefox is a no-go...

Darn. I tried installing Mozilla Firefox so that I could interface better with my blog editor, but it went very weird on me very quickly. Never mind then. (I suppose I could just post from the library, but that would be a real pain. But how can you have a blog without lots of links? Decisions, decisions...)

Talk about your convention bounces! It looks like President Bush now has a ten-point lead over the junior senator from Massachusetts. Looking around the blogosphere, it looks like the Democrats are getting freaked out by the eerie similarities with the Dukakis campaign. Their thinking is that they've been too nice until now, and they need to get mudslinging with a vengeance.

Riiiight. And this is supposed to attract voters HOW? I think anyone who would be suckered by this approach probably already has been, in the three years since 9/11 during which every Socialist hack has been comparing Bush to Hitler. You can't really improve on that (if "improve" is the word I'm looking for). My guess is that the rest of the campaign-season is going to look like a train-wreck in slow motion.

And now, a Gee Whiz Moment™:

The blogosphere (the pseudo-organic network of blogs on the internet) is absolutely the best thing that has happened for democracy since the Xerox machine took down the Soviet Union. In days past, an event would happen and the major news networks would have their editors sit down behind closed doors, eat a few donuts, and decide how they wanted to spin the story. Sometimes, all the networks would sit on a story for months before mentioning it, if they ever did, because the story threatened their interests. Those stories that were publicized were massaged, torqued, blurred, impacted, digested and otherwise messed over to fit with the editorial agendas in play.

And then came the blogs, personified by the Drudge Report and the breaking of the Monica Lewinski story.

Matt Drudge saw that the networks were sitting on this story for over a month, and clearly had no intention of breaking it. So Drudge, working out of his apartment on a personal computer and a standard internet hookup, fired the shot heard 'round the Net and blew that thing sky-high. The world would never be the same.

Now, an event happens. Before the big networks have even closed the office door for their meeting of donut-eaters, a first-hand witness either does a writeup in his blog, or calls a blogger he knows who does the writeup instead. (Usually multiply this first step by ten or so.) Then "Vodkapundit" might be cruising around and notice the story, and whip up a few links to it from his own site. "Cold Fury" might pick it up from Vodkapundit, "Heartless Libertarian" could pick it up from Cold Fury, and then Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit notices and links back to the original site. (Next thought by the original blogger: "Holy @$%*, look at the traffic-counter! I musta been instalaunched!" Followed by celebratory alcohols or whatever.) Pretty soon the entire blogosphere is humming, with cross-references to seven different news-feeds, audio-content from primary sources, detailed analyses of the different media-spins on the story, and general scorn at the hacks over at the Associated Press.

The marketplace of ideas just got hooked up to a rocket-engine. Never again will the Old Media have the power that they wielded as recently as last election. The little guy now has all the multitudes of the blogosphere on his side. It really is amazing, and only good things can result.