Bloggasm

Digg.com falls in love with its darlings and then buries them, leaving a whole horde of stories staring up from a shallow grave as the clumps of dirt rain down. We first saw this when some tiny but loud portion of the internet thrust every pro-Ron Paul blog post onto the front page. For awhile they were appearing so frequently that frat houses could have developed drinking games around them — drink a shot for every mention of Paul, two if the post is bitching that he’s being ignored by the “MSM.”

Eventually Diggers were feeling Paul fatigue and, faced with the realization that their democratic site had been hijacked by a bunch of crazed, delusional lunatics, they whipped out their burying fingers and put up a wall between the front page and the “upcoming” section, declaring “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”

This was followed by a wave of blog posts moaning about a “Ron Paul bury brigade,” some dark conspiracy from the establishment to beat down their revolutionary leader.

Now it’s happening again, only this time rather than pro Ron Paul stories, the guardians are itching to take down any story with even a whiff of negativity directed toward McCain. Yes, after the 500th anti-McCain Huffington Post story threw its hands over the top ledge of Mt. Everest, these fed up Diggers peeled each one of its fingers off and watched as it tumbled into the abyss.

Now a new wave of conspiracy theorists have set up their virtual picket signs, and leading their pack is blogger Jed Lewison, who issued this jewel of a quote to an LA Times reporter:

“In my view that’s not free speech,” Lewison continued. “They are asking their supporters to go and disrupt the flow of the opposition.”

This absolutely asinine interpretation of the meaning of “free speech” was then followed by the rather obvious statement from the reporter:

But though the pattern is clear — anti-McCain stories are much more likely to be buried — identifying who’s responsible is more difficult.

That’s the internet for you. Its evangelists will proclaim the virtues of its democratic structure, and then cry foul when that same democratic system fails to promote their own biases.