THE LOW POST: Off With Their Heads

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Q: Are bloggers too powerful?
A: Do I think they're important? Yes. Do I think the [bloggers] and Al Sharpton alone are the future of the Democratic Party? No! Welcome in, contribute, but it's about winning in November and moving the country forward, not about a firing squad in a circle.
-- Q&A with U.S. representative Rahm Emanuel, Aug. 28th issue of New York magazine

I badly want to move on to another topic in this column space -- there is very little in the world that is less interesting than the Democratic Leadership Council and their ilk -- but this stuff is fast becoming just too unbelievable to ignore.

What exactly does self-appointed congressional mega-celebrity and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emanuel mean (says a friend of mine in Congress of him: "He's an amoral, showboating cock") when he says, "Do I think [bloggers] and Al Sharpton are the future of the Democratic Party?"

That's actually not hard to figure out; it's political hack-ese for the human sentence bloggers = Al Sharpton. As for what he means by that: Just think about the thought process that had to go into Emanuel's adding of the phrase "and Al Sharpton," when Al Sharpton wasn't even part of the question. Ask yourself if you really believe Emanuel isn't aware that he's addressing the mostly white, Upper West Side readers of New York magazine when he "offhandedly" ties bloggers to the legendary gold-medallion-wearing icon from forty blocks north in Harlem.