I'm leaving the site for the same reason I had to stop posting on one of my sports team's popular message boards: what had started out as a forum dedicated to news meant to inspire the team's fanatics had become a paranoid, delusional shitfest in which anarchists and redneck jackasses gathered to collectively bitch about how their personal dreams of entitlement were being unfulfilled by a coaching staff that seemed to have other priorities than winning all battles regardless of cost and by any means necessary.
So let me leave those of you who are still in the diary with what we both no doubt hope will be some brief, sage bits of advice from a fellow who once made it through 5 years with a company in spite of twice finding himself in parking-lot fist-fights with the general manager, the second of which resulted in my getting a raise and entering into discussions involving company-wide health-insurance.
First, I'd like to address those of you who are here trolling for various miscellaneous reasons. Maybe you've never quite gotten over Hillary Clinton's primary debacle. Maybe you've never been an actual Democrat but you are here hoping to rearrange the furniture until it suits you. Or maybe you really are just a malicious douche who is taking advantage of the fact that supporting Israel around here can sometimes get you hide-rated, but calling the president an anti-gay bigot can occasionally get you a recc-listed diary. It doesn't really matter why you're here. What matters is that this is a site that supposedly supports Democrats. It's not here to support your paranoid fantasies in which all administration actions are designed to assist the evil "banksters" that Dylan Ratigan talks about, while pulling down his multi-million contract, courtesy of that mom-and-pop store, General Electic. It's not here to bust the president's balls on any and every single...fucking...issue that comes before any politician in Washington. It's here to support Democrats and to be mildly progressive on a host of issues. I know this because it's over in the mission statement somewhere.
So, I'd like to take a paragraph here and ask some of you to behave like actual adults and not like the whiney-assed, entitled, attention-deficit disordered, hyperbolic, self-important quacks (Cenk, this means you, mother*&%^!!) that some of you have turned out to be, now that I've woken up and found you rearranging my walk-in closet so that you can fit more of your shit into the space that was being occupied by my dress shoes until you held the yard sale while I was out-of-town last weekend.
I won't create a list here, because this rant is getting long enough as it is. What I'd suggest is that you stop acting like every act of politics is a personal betrayal of your trust. Health-care reform was modest and progressive. No, the health-insurance industry was not collectivized. No, CEO's of health-insurance companies were not forced to wear funny hats and to go harvest rice as part of a reeducation campaign. But that's democracy, and that's the way democracy works. If you thought voting for a Democratic presidential candidate was the same as buying your way into a revolution, then too bad. Things aren't happening as fast as you'd like them. That isn't a betrayal of your interests. That's life.
Nota Bene: You are of course welcome to hide-rate the tip-jar, but just be warned that everyone who has ever hide-rated one of my tip-jars has died a horrible lingering death, which some still have not recovered from....