Let's go way back to 2004 for a moment.
Fallujah was burning. The corpses of four (ahem) mercenaries were desecrated, receiving worldwide attention. (Probably only because there were pictures.) Our esteemed proprietor made an infamous, somewhat ill-considered remark in a comment (not on the front page). Various bloggers made a stink, completely in bad faith. It turned into a shitstorm.
It even got to the point where the Kerry campaign de-linked the Great Orange Satan.
Fast forward to Bill O'Reilly's handwaving from yesterday....
Everybody knows the details by now. But here I am, mouth agape, that the Dodd and Hillary (!!) campaigns have hit back, pointing to horrible things Bill has said on his show, and following the jabs up with a hook: not only are we NOT going to de-link Daily Kos, we're PROUD to be going to their convention in a couple weeks!
I mean, I'm just stunned. Are Edwards and Obama going to do likewise? Because my opinion of Hillary (and what the hell, Dodd too!) just rose considerably. She still has to figure out what she can do to end the Iraq war before she becomes President, but HRC and Dodd have ably demonstrated the ability to recognize who is a friend and who is an enemy. Kind of a key requirement to being President, I should think.
Some of the most vehement defenses of Kerry '04 were organized right here, even if we're a little rough around the edges at times. Hey, guess what? That's America. Americans tend, on the whole, to be a little....um, raw, at times....
But when push came to shove, Kerry backed out. On the one hand, it's hard to fault him, since the impact of the Internet on political organizing was not nearly as well understood in 2004 as it is now. Kerry had beaten Dean (the patron saint of sorts of the lefty blogosphere) in the primary, so maybe they figured they could pull a Sister Souljah on us. But the reason why it's Easy to find fault with Kerry's decision is that he didn't know who his friends were, and he played by the enemy's rules.
The same lesson applies to the Swift Boat campaign. As far as I know, DK was one of the very first organizations to try to systematically rebut Jerome Corsi and his band of merry liars. We had Kerry's back, but he didn't have ours.
Did that contribute to Kerry's loss to King George? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe somebody smarter than me can parse that one.
But it does mean that whoever gets the nomination next year's got a better chance to be President, because if there were ever a year when we needed to circle the wagons, it'll be 2008.
EDIT: Since I referenced the whole "screw em" business, it's only fair for me to include a link to Kos' defense here.