There. I said it.
And if I ever had any reason to doubt that simple truth, I was reminded of it while spending far more of my day than I should have commenting (and responding to comments) in the threads about the Don Siegelman piece that aired (or didn't, depending on where you were watching) last night on 60 Minutes.
Don't worry. I've got that out of my system now, having said pretty much everything I could possibly say about it in those comments sections. Go read those over there if you're still curious. I have something else to say after the jump.
One of the things I like about being here on dKos is that for a guy who doesn't know everything about everything, there are a lot of very knowledgeable people here who do know lots of things about areas in which my knowledge is sketchy or nonexistent. Over the weekend, for instance, I learned an awful lot about energy-efficient home design, not to mention the intricacies of the Nevada caucus system, the arcane details of the federal campaign financing system, and on and on.
And one of the things that I like about being the sort of person who comes to dKos instead of, say, LGF or RedState, is that most of the people here also don't know everything about everything, or at least don't act like they do. As a liberal (and damned proud of it, thank you!), I believe it's my obligation to ask questions about everything, to take nothing on blind faith, and to use my own experiences, as well as that which I learn from asking those questions, to make up my own mind about the world around me.
As a corollary, I think it's incumbent on me to share the knowledge and experience I do have in certain areas with anyone who might be interested in those subjects. In my particular case, one of those areas is broadcast technology and regulation. Want to get into all the arcane rules about TV station multiple ownership and license renewals? I'm your guy. Ask away.
So you can imagine, I hope (in the unlikely event you've read this far and not decamped for the latest diary about Obama vs. Hillary) how frustrating it was to realize that my perception (colored by my experiences and education) about what may or may not have happened with that Alabama TV station was, to put it kindly, not shared by very many other commenters here.
The overwhelming belief seems to be that the incident absolutely had to be intentional sabotage, and that no other explanation could possibly be credible.
I was frustrated, at first, to see how quickly some of my fellow Kossacks rejected any suggestion at all that the incident could have been anything other than deliberate political sabotage, and how unwilling some of them were to give the story even the slightest benefit of the doubt.
I've been thinking about it some more over the last few hours, and now I'm just sad - sad that we've reached a point, after all these years of Bushes and Gonzalezes and Cheneys and Mukaseys and Roves and Limbaughs and O'Reillys, where so many of us have so many very good reasons to automatically assume the worst. After all the crap we've all endured over the last generation of politicians and politics, why shouldn't we assume that behind every blank screen lies a dirty trick?
Like I said, I don't know a lot of things, and while I like to assume the best about the industry in which I've worked most of my adult life, upon reflection, I have to admit that I don't know that it wasn't a deliberate action, either.
But here's something I do know. I can't live the rest of my life in the country I still love (flag pin or not!) being automatically suspicious of everything and everyone around me.
I want to live in an America where it's possible to believe that what happened in Alabama last night really was a stupid technical foul-up, followed by an even more boneheaded CYA attempt, and not have to have the lingering feeling that maybe there was something more to it.
And, dammit, I don't know if this will be the year we finally turn that corner and put the people in office (not just the Oval, but at all levels of government) who can begin to rebuild that level of trust in our leaders and our nation. And I don't know, if we don't get there this year, if we'll get another chance like this in our lifetimes. But I like the odds.