This is my first attempt at a diary, here or anywhere else. Be kind.
Obama hangs out with terrorists. Obama hates America. Obama wants to disenfranchise Michigan and Florida. Obama is misogynist. Obama can't win white votes. Obama wins black votes because blacks are being duped. Obama wins college kids because they're stupid Kool-Aid drinkers. Obama wins intellectuals because he's an elitist. Obama is arrogant. Obama is too conservative to win. Obama is too liberal to win. Obama is a Muslim. Obama is a Muslim sympathizer. Obama hates Jews. Obama hates white people. Obama is a drug addict. Obama's pastor hates America. Obama doesn't wear a flag pin because he hates America. Obama's wife hates America. Obama is too nice to win. Obama is underhanded and mean. Obama is really losing the popular vote. Obama is destroying the Democratic Party. Et cetera. Et cetera.
Maybe I'm too wrapped up in the political world, or maybe I'm too partisan to look at things outside of my own prism. I know that I waste way too much time browsing through this site and others. But it seems to me that, as this process reaches a conclusion, the insanity (and inanity) of the divisions I see throughout the blogosphere and increasingly exponetially, and we are very much in danger of getting caught up in the trees, and not seeing the forest in front of us.
Every day, I stop by this site, MyDD, TPM, Politico and a bunch of other sites to kind of gauge the reactions and mindsets of those who, like me, invest way too much time and energy debating politics on the Internet. True, this is surely not representative of the Democratic Party as a whole, but it is representative of many of the activist coalitions that comprise its base. And what I see is quite frightening.
I fully admit that I'm preaching to the choir here, but have you all not seen accusations like the ones above scattered throughout the Internet with increasing vitriol over the last month even on supposedly progressive sites? A lot of it is certainly Republican trolling. But there is an element of anger and hatred and petulance out there I find staggering, considering that it comes from the same people who just a few years ago were united around the idea that George W. Bush was the worst president ever and needed to go.
Not to say I, as an Obamaniac, am without sin. Nor are other Obama supporters. I have said and written things that were hyperbolic towards Hillary Clinton, especially during the height of the Kitchen Sink strategy. But there is a key difference:
Our guy is winning. Theirs isn't. I don't think racism is behind the mental gymnastics and vehement resentment that a lot of HRC supporters (on the world of the tubes anyway) are prone to these days. Rather, it's a sense that this was her year, and why can't he just wait his turn.
It's petulance. It's resentment. And it's driving otherwise rational people to buttress their increasingly irrational and logically unsupported belief that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee with the type of wild accusations I mention above.
This collective temper tantrum is, I fully believe, part of the grief process - part of the same process we would have gone through had things not gone our way, before we united as a party. But at the end of the day, she will have to concede, and they will have to decide whether or not their hatred for Barack Obama is greater than their disgust with Republican politics, with war forever, with tax cuts for the rich, for school vouchers, for debt, for unfettered trade policy, for cutting social services.
They'll come around. Or they won't, and will be complicit in all of what a continuation of the Bush-Cheney years entails, including a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade and destroy civil liberties wherever it seems fit. In the meantime though, I think it behooves all of us to lead by example, to tone down the rhetoric, to take issue with John McCain, and let Hillary and her supporters do as they want.
After all, BHO has already won. We're just waiting for the Clintons to acknowledge it.