How To Deal With Dysfunction On The Left!

The left wing in this country has been fickle and dysfunctional when it comes to electoral politics for a long time. I remember Ted Kennedy throwing a monkey wrench into the reelection of President Jimmy Carter after challenging him in the primaries. That is just one example of how our party often sabotages itself, another would be the Gore/Bush race of 2000 when the refrain from many on the left was that there was no difference between the two. We all know how well that turned out for us liberals and the country. Elections matter, damn it.

Today, we are experiencing the same type of crap, but we also have opportunists like Jane Hamsher, Adam Green and Glenn Greenwald making money off that fickleness and idealism from some on the left.

Tien at The People’s View has another great post that helps to explain some of the different types of “non-supporters” of President Obama and how to deal with each type.

In brief the Narcissist suffers from a pathological need for attention; hypersensitivity to insults and criticism; an over-inflated sense of self-importance; unrealistic expectations and a preoccupation with success and power.

[...]

Their belief system is composed entirely of being against whatever “The President” believes in.

• Prospect for convincing them to support the current President: Non-existent.
• Strategy for coping with their behavior: Never make it personal. Always focus on what they do, not what they say or who they are.

The best way to undermine Narcissists is to ignore them and deprive them of the attention they crave. However, I’ve come to realize that very few people are actually capable of employing the tactic of responding in this fashion. The Narcissist counts on people ‘reacting’ to everything they say, and most people, particularly online, oblige them. That gives the Narcissist unearned power, but there it is. Trying to change their minds is an exercise in futility.

Does that remind you of anyone? Since joining Twitter back in late April, I’ve observed Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher in the Twitter world, where people’s thoughts are often a stream of consciousness, unedited and hard to put back in the bottle once let loose. These attention seekers send out Tweets that are clearly meant to inflame opponents and get them to either read their over-the-top rhetoric or engage with them online. I certainly fell for it initially, but soon realized that they were playing me and trying to get the attention that they seek. The more I gave them that attention, whether negative or not, the more they loved it. I’ve known for a long time that they would do anything for clicks on their blogs, since the traffic that helped to pay their bills dropped so dramatically after the 2008 election. That is why I never link to their websites. They don’t really care if the clicks they get are from supporters or opponents. But being new to Twitter back in the spring, it took me a little while to realize they were goading me into engaging with them for the same reasons. I’ve talked before about how they built their blog empires based on anger, mostly towards President Bush but also just anger in general. Republicans did it with the Tea Party anger and people like Jane Hamsher and Adam Green have filled that niche on the left. They have just shifted that anger towards President Obama.