After several attacks here about the quality and even the sincerity of Palast's journalism, we now learn that Tim Griffin has abruptly resigned, apparently in reaction to yesterday's Palast/BBC revelations to John Conyers.
I'm hearing a lot of silence on DKos about the Griffin resignation and Palast's presumed role in bringing that about. In that respect Daily Kos and the conventional media agree: let's not talk about Tim Griffin's resignation and let's not talk about Greg Palast.
If it's true that Palast's work led directly to the resignation of Tim Griffin, I think our community owes Greg a real apology, not just a tepid acknowledgment that he is "on our side."
How many of us have forced a key Bush/Rove henchman to resign?
Please read my UPDATE after the jump...
UPDATE, 5:25 pm EST
I was totally convinced this diary had scrolled off and wasn't being recommended at all. I checked it several times until about half an hour after posting it, and found only about 8 comments and two whole recommendations.
So I just forgot about it and did something else. Then I was reading the rec list and, surprise, there's my diary close to the top, and with a whole lot lot lot of comments.
Apparently I've stepped right into the middle of a contentious, roughly 50/50 divide among participants on this site. I'm not claiming that Palast is necessarily correct on everything, nor claiming to know that Griffin resigned because of the Palast story, nor even asserting that Palast's emails are genuine. The simple fact is that I have no way of knowing the answers to those questions.
Furthermore, Palast is definitely obnoxious and, I think, often sloppy. However, that should not lead to the angry diary I read by drational about how Palast is dangerous to Daily Kos. The theory that Palast is somehow a Rove plant, whose suspect evidence will eventually lead... to Dan Rather being fired all over again? I don't know, but it all just seemed too vitriolic and divisive.
Purely as a practical matter, I think we should give people "on our side" a bit more benefit of the doubt, and space to work, than we grant to Bush and Cheney, and their Republican enablers, and their bought-and-paid-for media supporters... if you get my drift. Have some common sense, folks! The enemy of my enemy is, well, kind of my friend, isn't he? Sort of, just by necessity.
Temporary alliances aren't fatal, especially if they lead to good results. You don't really think all these hundreds of thousands of DKos-ers and Democrats, etc., etc... really agree on much of anything, do you... except that we want Bush out of the White House and a Democrat in there instead. So, to echo Rodney King, can't we all just play together nicely?
For a purpose.
UPDATE 2, next day
Wow, diaries really get amplified! I mean, they take on a life of their own.
Into this diary I threw a kind of impulsive side remark. That side remark was fine as a comment, but I now realize I should not have made it into a diary.
I haven't completely changed my mind about the subject - I still think Palast is not a danger - but my opinions on that subject did not constitute good material for a diary. As a diary, my thoughts became a trigger for internal disputes, which can get hot and thereby distract from the purpose of this site.
On the bright side, as a result of posting this diary I now see that a "flame war" such as the one I started here is, in some ways, analogous to real, very serious conflicts. In the "real world" some dispute between two countries, or groups within one country, gets amplified by publicity and turns into a roughly 50/50 split of heated opinion. People pile onto each side, and suddenly the dispute turns into something new: a huge diplomatic fracas, and maybe even a war.
What I realize now is that this kind of amplification happens as a result of a particular communication configuration. In the case of Daily Kos, because of the way the site is programmed to work, diaries either get amplified or they disappear. Here at DKos this does not matter much. In fact, the amplification and the resulting disputes arguably make the site more interesting.
But in the real world of large groups of people armed with economic and military weapons, such amplification can be catastrophic.
Therefore, I think we as a civilization should strive to change our real-world communication configuration in order to lessen the likelihood of such out-of-control amplification, which is sort of like feedback from a microphone.
The right-wing echo chamber, for example, consists of a group deliberately taking advantage of an existing communication configuration, namely network radio and TV, to further their (evil) goals. Our key job in the blogosphere, I think, is to counteract the effects of those dangerous, easily exploited, one-way media configurations.
I exploited the Daily Kos configuration by writing this stupid diary. That was a dumb mistake on my part. But like most people, I make a lot of mistakes, because that's just the way we humans are. We often just flail about randomly, then watch to see what the results are. If we like the result, we repeat the action that caused it.
So I'm resolving not to do this again. I'm going to let my diaries remain unpublished overnight instead of immediately injecting them into the stream at a moment of instability, when feedback amplification is most likely.