The Internet Is for Scorn(continued)
(Photo: Getty Images) David Cross had a modest dream: a country home in upstate New York where he and his dog, Ollie Red Socks, could retire after a long day spent making hipsters laugh. So when the Boston-born comedian, who created the short-lived, beloved HBO series Mr. Show and had a recurring role in the short-lived, beloved Fox series Arrested Development, was offered a big paycheck in exchange for a few weeks of work on the disposable kiddie flick Alvin and the Chipmunks, he put aside his artistic integrity and took the cash. To his Internet faithful, he might as well have been the Fox executive who pulled the plug on Arrested Development. Cross was immediately branded a "smug, condescending asshole," and "a huge prick" on The Onion AV Club's blog for taking the role (more than 300 commenters chimed in, most in agreement). His friend, comic Patton Oswalt, mocked him on his MySpace blog. (Patton, for his part, turned down Alvin but did land the highbrow Ratatouille. He was also kidding, though most readers didn't pick up on it.) When a flabbergasted Cross took to his own website to post a defense, citing his desire hang out with friends in L.A. and make enough money to purchase the aforementioned country house, he was subjected to another round in the Internet pillory. (A commenter on Defamer called Cross' mea culpa "the shittiest fucking defense since the Nuremberg trials.") So, did he regret writing about the "small cottage on at least a couple of acres near some water" in his letter? "Well, I dunno," he told the New York Observer at the time. "The last couple days have been way less boring than they would've been."
It takes a special breed of individual to get hated on by conservatives and liberals alike—only Michael Moore comes to mind—but you can now add DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas to the list. Conservatives have never shied from voicing their opinions about the left-leaning Kos—Fox News' Bill O'Reilly once noted that "the site sells hate, as does the KKK and Nazis," but recent events have raised the ire of Kos' liberal base as well. Just last month, supporters of Hillary Clinton called for a de facto strike of DailyKos over what they felt were "unfair writing conditions" (getting abused in the "comment" section of a highly trafficked site by Obama-ites is taxing on both the body and mind!). One blogger's post about "never writing again" unless everyone stopped being so damn spiteful had to be closed after 1,258 commenters piped up in just five and a half hours. Quel scandal! Moulitsas himself seemed to enjoy the ruckus, telling ABC, "...I think it's great. It's a big Internet, so I hope they find what they're looking for," but he's certainly pissing off large chunks of his liberal fan base. "It's just not the open forum of discussion for liberal ideology it pretends to be," says one prominent political blogger of Kos. "If anything, it's helping to widen the rift within the Democratic party to the point where things are going to be a total clusterfuck come convention time." |
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