An Amusing Story -- With An Interesting Moral

This morning, Atrios and Shakespeare's Sister point us to this UK Observer story about how Bush's nationwide fundraising appeal for the Iraq invasion and occupation hasn't exactly got Bush backers to open their wallets wide:

An extraordinary appeal to Americans from the Bush administration for money to help pay for the reconstruction of Iraq has raised only $600 (£337), The Observer has learnt… The public's reluctance to contribute much more than the cost of two iPods to the administration's attempt to offer citizens 'a further stake in building a free and prosperous Iraq' has been seized on by critics as evidence of growing ambivalence over that country.

[UPDATE: A Kossack hunted up the USAID link to which the Observer story refers: The actual amount is $589.00 as of September 23, 2005.] This is yet another reason the internet in general, and blogs in particular, are more effectively used by the left than by the right. I've wondered out loud in this blog before why that should be so, and I think I've finally hit on it: Hardcore righties don't think in terms of community. Ever. They do think in terms of top-down leadership, but they never think in terms of "let's all work together for the common good". They think in terms of getting their little soapboxes out there, getting their craven GOP/Media Axis buddies to give them free publicity -- publicity and "respectability" that is never quite granted by the corporate media to lefty blogs -- and spreading their version of reality. That's why there are gobs and gobs of new righty blogs out there, even as the righty share of the blogosphere is shrinking, both in terms of actual readership numbers and in terms of the percentage of the blogosphere's readership, despite the best fluffing efforts of the GOP/Media Axis. These are all people who are talking to themselves out loud or chasing the same half dozen readers. This is why they could never do a Howard Dean and raise money from the Net the way he did (and does). This is why Jean Schmidt's appeal for grass-roots funds against Paul Hackett fell flat and she was compelled not to just spend 200K of her own money, but to put out an emergency appeal to the RNC in the last week before the election. (And even though she squeaked by on the skin of her teeth -- in an election that is still somewhat questionable -- Hackett's people got so many voters to the polls that they got passed every single school and municipal levy for the area, including a few that had been languishing for years.) The simple fact is this: Lefties give until it hurts, and then give some more. Most righties don't give at all -- and the richer righties only give if they think there's a percentage in it for them, or they can control what's happening.