Around the blogosphere

Not much time today for a big post, so here's a few drops from around the 'sphere.

DonkeyDigest hits David Sirota for his latest display of unmitigated arrogance. I guess I have to be thankful that Sirota has such a great sense of self-importance; if he didn't feel the need to slam back at Dan Gerstein over his initial revelation that he'd applied for a job with Lieberman, my first blog would have never been noticed. Sirota's vanity (I'm running out of synonyms for "arrogant") simply does not allow for others to criticize him, regardless of whether the criticism is reasonable or not, because no one should dare criticize the Great Sirota. I have no desire to replay that whole episode, but I simply can't understand how Sirota got to be so full of himself. In the eternal words of Hawkeye Pierce: Hey Dave, could I stop by sometime for a cup of ego?

Matt Stoller at MyDD has video of George Allen apparently making a racial slur at a guy holding a camera from the Webb campaign. Stoller said:

George Allen, I'm glad you're finally out of the closet as a racist. It must have been really hard to restrain yourself for all these years.

Well, if wearing a Confederate flag lapel in college and having a noose in your office (see TNR) is restraining yourself...

Politics1, my personal favorite blog, caught OH GOP Gov. nominee Ken Blackwell making a ridiculous comparison of his Dem opponent, Ted Strickland, with ailing Cuban dictator Fidel Castro on his campaign's official blog. Blackwell pulled a Hamsher by removing the offending photo a few hours after it was put up, so I hope someone got a screenshot.

And here's something to consider - the HI Senate race, where Rep. Ed Case has pulled into a statistical tie with incumbent Sen. Daniel Akaka in the latest poll on the Democratic primary (Akaka 47%, Case 45%). I'll blog more on this at some point, but this is a highly unusual primary - Case is essentially running to Akaka's right, on a platform that does not really attack Akaka's record so much as argue that it's simply time for a change. In the CT or RI primaries, the same message is being used to great success, but both challengers in those races are running by appealing to the party base, which obviously tend to be the driving force in primaries. If the "time for a change" message works in a Dem primary against an incumbent who is actually more liberal than his opponent, this could be the strongest signal yet that voters are in an anti-incumbent mood.

UPDATE: Forgot to include my favorite part of Ed Kilgore's analysis of Sirota's Queeg-esque mentality:

The Sirota style is perhaps best illustrated by his choice of words to describe yours truly: "formerly a Zell Miller staffer," underlined with a link to a news report about Miller's despicable 2004 Republican National Convention speech. The reader is presumably to understand that my secret fidelity to the GOP cause--which of course, I am lying about--is exposed by this association. Here's the thing: I worked for Zell from the fall of 1992 until the end of 1994, in a period when absolutely no one thought of him as anything other than a very loyal and partisan Democrat--indeed, as a bit of a "populist." And I have written far more sad and angry words (here, here, here, and here) about Miller's slide into apostasy and his eagerness to serve his old enemies in the GOP than anybody else you will meet.

So my work for Zell Miller in the early 90s is clearly no more relevant today than David Sirota's interest in working for me and Al From in 1997. If I did a post casually referring to Sirota as a "disappointed job-seeker at the DLC," he'd be rightly offended. But he shouldn't be able to have it both ways.

Well spoke, Ed. People often forget that Zell Miller was the arch-enemy of the Christian Right in Georgia until he got to the Senate and flipped his lid. Exposing Sirota's hypocrisy on this point is a thing of beauty.