As a child of the sixties, I enjoyed Cosmic Debris's diary, and I appreciate the sentiment and nostalgia. But "Counterculture" is the last word Daily Kos needs to describe itself.
Remember, the sixties "counterculture" lost -- politically anyway. (Perhaps it triumphed culturally, but that is another issue.) Nixon was helped into power by members of the "counterculture," justly furious about Humphrey's war support, but who sat out the '68 election. Since '68, we've had increasingly right wing Republican Presidents, interrupted by two centrist or even conservative Democrats.
A term like "Counterculture" plays right into the hands of the right and its media allies, who search Kos comments for "crazy lefty" ideas to trumpet in an effort to demonize Kos as a far left site -- when in reality, the beliefs of most here on major issues echo those of substantial majorities of Americans.
It plays into the hands of those who want to portray FDR/JFK Democrats as dangerous lefties, and the moderate right as the center.
It plays into the hands of fellow [PNAC] travellers like Beinart, who seek to obscure their lunatic support for Bush's Iraq war by continuing to accuse anti-Iraq war Democrats of failing to be serious about opposing the jihadists.
Just the other day, I heard draft-age Pete on NPR's On Point, trying to outline his thesis by dissing the "Move-on" or "McGovern" wing of the Democrats. As if to prove my point, another guest was Max Boot, who added to those demonizing terms "the George Soros wing" of the party. (As though a mult-billionaire financier who had as much or more than Reagan to do with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe were the ideological heir of Abby Hoffman or Mark Rudd.) Beinart did not disagree with Boot's characterizations.
The beauty of this site is its pragmatic (dare I say "Big Tent") approach to electing Democrats by attracting and mobilizing thousands of people in a way that did not exist five years ago. It's not a "counterculture," it's (to turn around a terrible Nixon phrase), the "silent majority," unrepresented on Sunday mornings, but rising up in a revolutionary form in an attempt to save this country from the grave threat of an out-of-control right.
So pace Abbie, Jerry et al. Kos can take the best of the sixties and transform it into a new Democratic era.