BUT SINCE 9/11 I'M OUTRAGED BY CHAPPAQUIDDICK THE NSA.

From out of the past, Jeff Jarvis on the NSA revelations:

As a Democrat, I am disgusted with President Obama

I haven't paid attention to Jarvis for a while, preferring the 2.0 Twitter version, FakeJeffJarvis ("Other kids dreamed of being an astronaut. I dreamed of having 500+ LinkedIn connections"). I remember him as the right wing's second favorite futurist, and one of their very favorite bullshit liberals; a man who described himself as "a former liberal pacifist transformed by 9/11 into an avid warblogger," and of whom a fan aptly said to Ann Althouse, "I think people on the right are also horrified at just how left the left has become when people like you and Jeff Jarvis and Instapundit are labeled as conservative or hard right..."

Jarvis has been since-9/11-outraged-by-Chappaquidick for a long time. I also recall him after the 2006 Congressional elections, wishing Joe Lieberman's victory would deprive the Democrats of a Senate majority. And in the 2008 campaign there were few standard-issue anti-Obama sentiments Jarvis did not circulate. March 21, 2008: "I may be the only person who’s not become worshipful of Obama’s speech on race and religion and who finds it more disturbing the more I think about it." April 30, 2008: "Now I’m actually angrier about Obama and the Rev. Wright than before." Etc.

After Obama won, Jarvis was momentarily pleased:

I have been impressed with Obama post-election. He has been moving to the center, where I am glad to see him. He has been unafraid to work with strong characters from the Clinton administration, including his rival. He was unafraid to reach out with a peace offering to the left’s boogeyman, Joseph Lieberman.

Thereafter he used Obama as a means of flogging his usual futurist schtick -- "Now that Barack Obama is in the White House, he must continue to use and spread the tools of the internet and transparency that he so brilliantly plied to win the office or else it would make his promises of change empty."

But Jarvis' thinkfluence didn't amount to much, and now in 2013 he's decided to take a bold stand "as a Democrat" against Obama because of the NSA.  This from a guy who used to say when people bitched about the NSA under a President not named Obama, "this isn’t as simple as raising the tattered-from-overuse privacy flag" -- also known as the "privacy buggabuzzword."

When it's important I'm willing to make common cause with some rightwing asshole to push the tide back on civil liberties. But when you line up with Rand Paul you know what you're getting. Jarvis is so full of shit, he's as useless as an ally as he is as an opponent -- maybe even more useless; he discredits any cause by adopting it. I'm beginning to think newspapers would already be utterly dead by now if Jarvis hadn't spent the past ten years predicting it.