Village Green

I've credited Digby for the term "Village" before (and use it all the time, hell I have an entire category of posts dedicated to the damn thing) but here she explains the story behind the sobriquet which is actually something I wasn't 100% aware of.

I have been getting a huge number of hits today from Greg Sargent's old blog post about the genesis of the term "the Village" which I eventually traced to this post today by John Aravosis, who hadn't heard the term and didn't know where it came from.

I have explained this before but I think it's worth repeating once in a while since the term is actually fairly common in the blogosphere. Greg is right that it stems from the notorious Sally Quinn article about the Clintons. But it's more than that. It's shorthand for the permanent DC ruling class who have managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth.

It's about their phoniness, their pretense of speaking for "average Americans" when it's clear they haven't the vaguest clue even about the average Americans who work in their local Starbucks or their drive their cabs. (Think Tim Russert, good old boy from Buffalo, lately of Nantucket.)It's about their intolerable sanctimony and hypocritical provincialism, pretending to be shocked about what they all do, creating social rules for others which they ignore themselves.

That Sally Quinn article is here, by the way, and it's a doozy.

"This is a community in all kinds of ways," says ABC correspondent Cokie Roberts, whose parents both served in Congress. She is concerned that people outside Washington have a distorted view of those who live here. "The notion that we are some rarefied beings who breathe toxic air is ridiculous. . . . When something happens everybody gathers around. . . . It's a community of good people involved in a worthwhile pursuit. We think being a worthwhile public servant or journalist matters."

"This is our town," says Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the first Democrat to forcefully condemn the president's behavior. "We spend our lives involved in talking about, dealing with, working in government. It has reminded everybody what matters to them. You are embarrassed about what Bill Clinton's behavior says about the White House, the presidency, the government in general."

And many are offended that the principles that brought them to Washington in the first place are now seen to be unfashionable or illegitimate.

Muffie Cabot, who as Muffie Brandon served as social secretary to President and Nancy Reagan, regards the scene with despair. "This is a demoralized little village," she says. "People have come from all over the country to serve a higher calling and look what happened. They're so disillusioned. The emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn't quite as sordid as this."

Cokie Roberts and Joe F'ckin Lieberman...man this is like the All-Madden Team of Village Suck. Reading through that monstrosity you see the same players now that were there 15 years ago: Lieberman, Cokie, Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, George Stephanopolis, Rahmbo, David Gergen, and of course Dean Wormser himself, David Broder. They treated the Clintons like the Deltas from Animal House. It explains everything and the little insular New England community that the Village pretends to be doesn't like outsiders.

And it sure as hell doesn't like America...or the Obamas. If the Clintons were the Deltas from Animal House, then the Village seems to think the Obamas are the Tri-Lambs from Revenge of the Nerds.

Only in the end, the nerds won...