Way too many readers/contributers here have been exhibiting a mentality similar to what is seen in cults. They cannot tolerate any criticism of those they have exalted to some superior status and the quality of what is said by their exalted ones is always assumed to be superior. They travel in mini-packs, rewarding their hero and punishing those who criticize their hero by either posting disparaging (and all to frequently personal attacks) responses to the criticism or slapping troll ratings on what they see as the offending comment. Good Diaries fall off the front page quickly while the Diaries written by the Kos Kool Kids get elevated to Recommended status and dominate the prime real estate.
This is not a criticism of those who are at the top of the heap here - I probably agree with people like Maryscott and Armando 90% of the time and both have frequently been very supportive of my opinions and take on things. However, both, as well as Kos and others, have also been dead wrong on occasion and were rewarded for being so and those who could see in real time the error they were making were punished for their insight and clarity. If not for their bylines on those types of Diaries and comments, they would never have reached Recommended status and garnered gobs of four ratings - and that's what demonstrates that a Personality Cult exists here.
That leads all of us to being cheated or shortchanged in how much value we get from the time we spend at dKos. I come here for political/social critique and information. I may love reading personal stories that have nothing to do with the current state of American politics and social institutions. However, this is not where I go when I want that sort of reading material; just as I don't turn on Dateline or Last Survivor if I want to see a documentary. Almost three years ago I could read Atrios and dKos as well as all the comments, MHO (when it published), Daily Howler, Salon, Counterpunch, assorted other opinion pieces and scan the MSM online publications in my spare time. Today, I can only hit a few Diaries and threads at dKos and spend way too much time scrolling through the Diaries for the gems that get overlooked. The days I open even half of those on the "Recommended" listing are rare. The volume of available reading material in the leftwing portion of the blogosphere has grown at an exponential rate in the past three years, but I'm only slightly better informed now than I was then and the open exchange of ideas/thoughts among readers is actually less valuable (except for the Propagannon investigation during the past week and a half).
Just one word to those who are offended by all the attention and focus the gay prostitution component of the Gannon story has received. We here don't make the facts. We can play a role in identifying them and getting them into the stories and then working to get them out to the general public. If this were June 1972 and we were all blogging, a large number of us would be pushing on the Watergate break-in story. We were the ones who knew it wasn't the odd little incident that was reported in the MSM at the time. We had no trouble instantly reading it for what it was, and that was part of the whole Nixon administration corruption. We also knew that the burglary held a key to breaking into the scope of the political corruption of Nixon and his gang. Yet, like many here today at dKos, the voices urging "move along; nothing here to see" were more prevalent back then and the country was less predisposed to consider corruption in the Nixon WH than they are today with GWB's WH. Those of us who smelled it back then have an advantage in smelling the full import of Propagannon over the younger readers here. We understand the arc of a great scandal because we've lived one. Trust us. The glee we are experiencing about the disclosure of Guckert's gay prostitution is that we know it is a bigger bombshell than what we hoped to discover when we first started looking into this matter. It may not be at the level of discovering that Nixon had secretly taped all his Oval Office conversations, but it exhibits the same level of arrogance and hubris as that taping did. And arrogance and hubris is always what leads to taking down scams, cons and manipulation.
If we all read and think more, comment less and use the rating and recommend buttons more judiciously and based on quality and not personality, we may find that we will all benefit from our self restraint and high standards by having less to wade through and thereby, become better bloggers.
(I would urge those who hit those ones and two ratings button for comments that criticized one of your favorite contributors to consider going back and revising them - many of those comments were making strong points and warranted more respect than they were given.)
Enough of this interlude and back to Propagannon and taking down GWB.