Beams and Motes
Well, it was just a matter of time, I guess. Perhaps upset at occasional bouts of Sympathy for the Devil being posted on his own page, Kos of DailyKos has more or less called for kicking the DLC out of the Democratic Party for being mean to other Democrats. Or at least I have no other way of understanding today's characterization of myself and my colleagues as "the media's handy tool for Democratic bashing. Enemies of unity of the left. Self-important fools who exist merely to advance the other side's agenda." Nothing much ambiguous about that, eh?
The crowning "outrage," apparently, is the recent suggestion by Al From and Marshall Wittman that maybe the leadership of MoveOn doesn't speak for the Democratic Party as a whole, a suggestion Kos chooses to interpret as a call for the party to "purge millions of supporters from its ranks." (Oh, yeah, Al also mocked bloggers; I somehow managed to get over it, down there in my basement).
Man, talk about beams and motes. The vitriol that's been poured on the DLC by Kos and several other netwarriors in the last couple of years is endless, personal, often obscene, and frankly, a little nuts. If we're as irrelevant as he keeps insisting we are, why bother? Just ignore us, and we'll go away, right? If our only value, as Kos suggests today, is to provide right-wing media with anti-Democratic quotes, then you have to wonder why so many elected officials bother to identify with us and come to our events (e.g., one today attended by Sen. Joe Biden)?
Indeed, that question seems to bother Kos as well, since his very next post begins a process of "calling out" DLC-friendly Democratic pols and asking them to disassociate themselves from us. He even took the trouble to dig down in our web page--bypassing a few hundred thousand pages of policy work, which is what we do to pass the time while waiting for the next call from Fox News--and discover that Sen. Barack Obama is still listed in our data base! Scandal! (He's in there because he recently joined the Senate New Democrat Coalition, all of whose members are in our database, which is about as controversial as a phone book). Hillary Clinton? Evan Bayh? Better get away from those people, or risk the consequences.
This is more embarrassing than anything else, to tell you the truth. If Kos was screaming at us for alleged agreement with Bush or something, he'd at least have the beginnings of an argument. But being called "divisive" by a guy who's way around the bend in hating this particular group of Democrats is just a bad joke.
Well, I for one ain't going anywhere. And having contested this particular guy's right to show me the door, I will say no more about this or future Kos temper-tantrums. After all, I've got some of that deceptive Republican-bashing to do, and a few of those issues to work on that nobody cares to hear from me about. And despite this terrible anathema, I remain ready to break bread with anybody in the party who wants to talk, self-important fool that I am.
UPDATE: Turns out I was misinformed about Obama's being a member of the Senate New Democrat Coalition. The misunderstanding was based on the two different meanings of "New Democratic Senators," but we were wrong about that, and have removed his name from our Directory. Still love the guy, though.
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