With all the hilarity from White Blind Lemon's
troll diary today, and his/her comments on John Murtha elsewhere, came an interested revelation about why it is that the people on the right don't understand us.
Oh, sure, we've known this, but the lesson has never (as far as I've seen) been made so clear: the people on the right think we are just like them! So, when they try to pretend to be on our side, to cause trouble as trolls, what they do is try to imagine allegiance to left-wing leaders and operate from there, without ever considering that it's not the leaders that are important to the left (they are, of course, to the right), but the way of thinking about leadership.
No matter what White Blind Lemon tries to do, he (I do assume it's a "he") gets "outed" almost immediately. It must be driving him crazy: "How do they know? I say just what they say--or almost--but none of them get snookered! What am I doing wrong?"
We won't go into how even his pseudonym is a giveaway....
White Blind Lemon's plan seems to have been to make statements that, if supported, could be turned against dKos. Since Yearly Kos and the even higher than usual dKos profile, I'm afraid this is going to be happening more and more. It's akin to trying to use Markos' mercenary statement against him, though this is a little more underhanded. By twisting words of support for Cindy Sheehan and John Murtha just slightly, WBL must have thought he could get acolades here--and then use that to make dKos look bad.
Thing is, his statements were too obviously skewed.
The interesting thing is, however, his misapprension that, if he seemed to be supporting our "leaders," we would support him. This, like I said, is the mistake the right makes in looking at us. They don't know how to handle dKos, where there really is no leader (Markos is much more of a coordinator than a leader), for their whole philosophy is based on a "shoot the head and the body will die" philosophy.
So, they go after each new leader from the left. Jerome Armstrong, Keith Olbermann, it doesn't matter who. And they use what they think is our allegiance to those leaders to try to trap us, like WBL is attempting.
It has worked, at times. It worked against Al Gore and John Kerry. But it is getting less and less effective--and for two reasons. One: more and more people are getting more and more upset at what the right is doing to this country. Two: places like dKos are making "leadership" less important than it was--we are now controlling the leaders in a way that hasn't happened in an awfully long time.
We on the left have never been comfortable with top-down leadership of the sort seen on the right. And now we are beginning to throw off (can anyone say "Hillary?) the leaders who want us just to follow them rather than listening to us.
This confuses the right, where leadership is sacrosanct. They think we must have a secret love of our leaders.
We don't, WBL. And when people post here with slavish admiration for a leader, we know something is up.
I'd worry that I'm giving too much away to the right, here--but I also know that they won't get it.