It's a simple question, Kossacks: What is the best diary you've ever written?
Okay, I lied. It's not necessarily a simple question, especially if you've written a lot of diaries. Or rather, it's perhaps a simple question with a not-so-simple answer. If you're like me or thousands of other users here, you've spent countless hours writing, editing, crafting, proofreading, and polishing your diaries, and then spent another measure of countless hours responding to others in the comment section. There are many reasons why a person would apply this kind of time and effort participating on Daily Kos, but if you're like me, I suspect that it's because you enjoy it on some level, or think it's important, or both. So after all this time on this website, how do you pick which one single diary is the one you believe is your best? Isn't that a little complicated, like choosing which band you think is the best of all time?
Your best diary -- the one you consider to be better than all others that you've written -- may be the one which garnered the most tips and recs. Or, it may be related to the political topic that you consider to be the most important. Or, it may be related to several interconnected political topics. Or, it may be the one that you feel had the best and most thoughtful responses from the comment section. Or, it may be the one where you were the first to report on a major story, or broke new information that was not previously discussed. Or, it may be the one where you felt you made best use of research or historical documents to make a larger point about today. Or, maybe it was a personal story with which others could identify with your experience. Or, maybe it had nothing to do with politics at all.
I don't want to complicate things too much -- maybe your answer today is very different from what you would have said three months ago or what you will say three months from now -- so I'll just state that there isn't really a right or wrong answer. The point is that it's your answer. Others may disagree with your choice, and that's fine, but there's no one who can really know what you consider to be your best diary except you.
So here's my answer: A diary from April 27, 2010 entitled Disgraceful Government Hypocrisy Over WikiLeaks & ACORN. It was an essay in which I described how our government and mainstream media behaved one way in response to James O'Keefe's leaked videos about ACORN (by unconstitutionally stripping ACORN of funding without any judicial review and smearing it as a radical and criminal organization while treating O'Keefe as a trusted source of information), and behaved another way in response to WikiLeaks's leaked Collateral Murder video (by treating the 2007 Apache helicopter incident in New Baghdad with virtual silence and no investigation into it whatsoever). Here's a brief passage:
Government #1 remains extremely quiet over the killings depicted in the WikiLeaks video, with no calls for an investigation of the incident. Government #2 explodes with outrage over innuendo depicted in the O'Keefe/ACORN videos, and votes to defund ACORN without any formal investigation of the charges in court. What these two governments have in common is that powerful media interests actively seek to distort information and suppress the truth of both issues.
The important question, then, is why these seemingly disparate governments have completely contradictory reactions to these two controversies, despite the fact that both sets of videos alleged to have depicted criminal wrongdoing when they were first released. The reality is that there aren't two American governments operating in multiple universes -- it's the same government with the same players -- yet it's a power structure that treated ACORN as a witch to be burned at the stake without a trial, whereas the killing and wounding of civilians in Iraq has thus far been treated with virtual silence. Why is that?
.....
The short answer to the question? It's simple: Hypocrisy.
Though it was highlighted by DK3's Diary Rescue team, you wouldn't think the diary was my best by the numbers -- just 28 comments and 40 recs, when I've had diaries that have shot to the top of the Rec List before.
But, that essay was a monumental undertaking on my part. It took me several days just to write and it involved a lot of research which, if I may say so, was strongly corroborated by the evidence. It was a story that I could tell with an illustrative narrative -- a tale of two cities, two governments and medias at work, and two very important issues that bound them together and continue to shape our political discourse today. To this day, I consider it my best work, even if not the most widely read. You'll imagine my surprise when I recently found out that the diary was used as a source for the pre-production of an independent documentary by Sundial Pictures called ACORN Alive: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America's Most Controversial Community Organizers. I have no idea if and when this film will ever be released, but how often can an anonymous, low-profile blogger such as myself say that my work served as valuable information for a movie, even one that may never grow beyond its initial stages?
So now it's your turn, Daily Kos, to participate in a little historical Diary Rescue just for you. What do you think is your best diary?