Dear All,
I've really enjoyed being here over the years, but I'm sensing a change coming in how I spend my time.
Last night a diary was posted that said that, because Harry Reid said
There are a lot of decisions that are made that are right that may not be absolutely totally within the framework of law. For example with President Nixon . . . I mean . . . should he have been impeached or did President Ford do the right thing?....
he was "undecided on murder, torture, anal rape, and sodomizing children."
Now, I am someone who prides myself on being a part of the reality-based community, so I called the diarist on the obvious bullshit in this premise (not to mention the religious and mental-illness intolerance implied in the diary) , and gave an HR.
And almost no one came to my support. Now, I don't really care about the support thing so much as the implications that it carries for this site.
Harry Reid is fundamentally a good man. He does things that make us all crazy from time to time, and may not even be the best person to lead the Senate right now. But no one would question how he feels about those activities unless they were trying to make an exaggerated point and manipulate their audience. Since some of you might want evidence of this, I might point out his support for SCHIP. Here is a paragraph about his battles over SCHIP:
Reid said, "We're not going to compromise." He added that Bush's comment on Wednesday that he might be willing to add a "little more money" to the program is "an insult." According to Reid, the House in approving the compromise bill "basically took [the Senate's] position with very few changes. You cannot wring another ounce of compromise out of it" (Pierce, Roll Call, 10/4). Reid and other Democrats on Thursday at a press event used piles of fake money as they criticized Bush "for losing $9 billion of taxpayer funds in one year in Iraq and vetoing $7 billion a year for children's health care," the Washington Times reports (Miller, Washington Times, 10/5).
Sounds like the guy is a fighter for the welfare of children, doesn't it? But I'm not an expert on Reid's legislative history, and I really didn't need to be in order to call bullshit on that attack diary.
We all get mad at our Democratic leaders, and wish they would do things differently. But entering the fantasy land explored by that diary is not reality-based. It is exaggerated, hyperbolic, silly, offensive, and counter productive for this site, which Kos has described like this:
This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog. One that recognizes that Democrats run from left to right on the ideological spectrum, and yet we're all still in this fight together. We happily embrace centrists like NDN's Simon Rosenberg and Howard Dean, conservatives like Martin Frost and Brad Carson, and liberals like John Kerry and Barack Obama. Liberal? Yeah, we're around here and we're proud. But it's not a liberal blog. It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory. And since we haven't gotten any of that from the current crew, we're one more thing: a reform blog. The battle for the party is not an ideological battle. It's one between establishment and anti-establishment factions. And as I've said a million times, the status quo is untenable.
Harry Reid is the Democratic majority leader in the fucking US Senate. He's from a traditionally conservative state, but he's on our side. He has a beautiful family and is devoted to them. I know this because I know one of his kids. And yes, that knowledge does bear on the attack diary. I know him to be a man incapable of the nonsense in that diary. And if exageration was used to make a rhetorical point, I'd ask if that point couldn't be more effectively made otherwise. Because if anyone from the Reid family read that nonsense, they'd be justified in saying that DailyKos is to be ignored at all costs. Of course, they would be missing the point that DKos is not monolithic and has a diversity of opinions and so on. Right? I used to think so, but I'm starting to wonder, because 25 people approved of last night's diary (including some well-known diarists and at least one front-pager), and those of us who disagreed caught serious shit.
This community has stood together against certain kinds of speech, for example, ripping on the military in IGTNT diaries (DKos at its best). The issue isn't that such speech happens on this site. It is that, in last night's case, such speech seems to be supported by a majority of Kossacks.
Let me go out on a limb here. Writing that the Democratic Senate Majority leader is undecided on child rape is as bad as writing shit in the IGTNT diaries. It is as bad as saying that Bill and Hillary killed Vince Foster or that Obama is a fascist or that the US Government was behind 9/11. It doesn't serve this site's purpose. It represents the tactics of the other side. It is bullshit, and it hurts our cause and makes all of us look stupid. Keep it up and it will make us irrelevant.
So I'm looking for a sign here. Am I out of step with the site? Because even though I love reading Hunter and a bunch of the rest of you, I can't see spending my time in a place that can be so incredibly herd-like and negative. It makes me feel dirty. And save your pixels, I won't let the fucking door hit me on the way out.