This is in response to a diary currently getting accolades regarding a Washington Post hatchet job on bloggers. My comments below.
The current article regarding bloggers that is getting accolades by the usual people here who can't see the reality of the writing because they don't wish to offend the subject, is with further reading a hatchet job. And it is not just a hatchet job on the subject of the article, it is a hatchet job on the entire Progressive blogging community.
It compartmentalizes all bloggers as to begin with "left", which they are all not..."angry", which we may be but not in the "wide eyed raving lunatic" context that was depicted in this hatchet job article. It also makes us (and in particular those who post here at Daily Kos since this site was mentioned specifically) look as though we are all chain smoking tourette syndrome lunatics who get up at the crack of dawn, disregarding all else in our lives simply to pound our keyboards all day in order to deal with the hatred for Bush that we stew in.
In other words, it demeaned the reasons behind the "constructive" indignation so many of us are now feeling in watching the slow deconstruction of this Democratic Republic at the hands of those who hijacked this government and their enablers in our Congress, and it did not even touch on the very valid reasons why this constructive anger even exists, nor the many good people out here who are actually putting their words to action. It makes us look like all hype and no substance. And I do believe that was exactly the intention.
Now, I don't care what you wish to do in your personal life. If you wish to expose your personal life and your family to the scrutiny of media vultures like this, have at it. However, when it is spun that you then speak for everyone in this community, that is where I draw the line and why I feel the need to set the record straight on that, and to also set the Washington Post straight.
For the last six years, this country has been experiencing the slow and steady move from a Democratic Republic to a theocratic oligarchy. We have experienced the theft of an election that took from us our rightful President with no remedy for it. And all we got from that was the corporatization of our voting process and the ownership of our votes by special interests. We are experiencing an economy that is making more rich at the expense of the poor, with poverty on the rise, and with deficits in the trillions that will be passed onto our children as we spend billions a week on a war that was based on lies and is killing our children daily. We are seeing the slow and steady erosion of civil liberties and the basic tennets of ethics and morality in policies across the board regarding both foreign and domestic policy.
We have seen our Gulf Coast drown and the issues that could have been faced from it being totally ignored by those who claimed they were uniters and not dividers. We see our country as now having lost it's soul, all moral high ground, and all respect in the international community. We have seen the steady destruction of our environment, and the total indifference to the climate crisis that is now effecting not only this country but our world.
In other words, we have seen that those who didn't think enough of our Constitution and the American people enough to abide by that Constitution in allowing us to have our rightful President, now violating every international law, treaty, rule of law, and law of conscience in pursuing an ideology of revenge, greed, war, and repressive destructive policies that are actually putting our country more at risk, with total indifference to the plight of those Americans who now suffer the most as a result of those policies. And we now also must face the total lack of spine in both houses of Congress by the majority in both Parties, as we now face the question of will we now truly do the unthinkable: incite a nuclear war.
Therefore, I don't even believe that anger can adequately describe the true feeling many of us are experiencing right now. It would be more like sadness, outrage, shock, and indignation. And for me, those feelings are not inside me because I am part of any "angry left." That is a FOX news phrase clearly meant to pidgeonhole and label, and I find it totally insulting. I feel this way because I am an AMERICAN, and one who loves this country and cherishes and respects the Constitution and the rule of law. And these feelings were not borne out of my being powerless. They were borne out of this regime ABUSING ITS POWER, and the very media outlets who now call us angry, ENABLING those abuses.
Therefore, based on the total misrepresentation of Americans in this article and the fact that the subject of it seems to approve of this article, I must then say that she does not speak for me, and actually wouldn't anyway. I have and always will speak and think for myself. That is what in my opinion sets Democrats and others apart from the current Republican Party made up of enablers and goosesteppers, and I am not a goosestepper.
I am also not one who sits twelve hours a day just pounding on my keyboard as this article wished to portray all of us. I do have a job, I do take care of a family, and I do put my words into action. And I believe it to be a mistake for people to just blindly accept any bit of media attention they get without first scrutinizng the true motivations that may lie behind such attention. Especially in an election year with Bush's polls number in the low thirties, and the media conglomerates in their pockets.
The blogosphere is made up of a diverse group of AMERICANS who all have their own way of expressing their outrage with the current state we find this world in. For the Washington Post to try to depict us all as people who only sit on a blog to release hot air with nothing accomplished for it is in my opinion very unprofessional. I'm not the "angry left", I'm an angry American, and I have every right to be angry in as far as I will now use that anger to seek the positive change necessary to take this country back from those who have sought to suck all the good out of it.
My question to the Washington Post then is, why aren't you?