With Daily Kos only six days away from celebrating its sixth birthday (that's the equivalent of about 99 years in Internet time), Top Comments is once again delving back into the days when Daily Kos was part of the blogging frontier, in the middle of a huge growth spurt and dealing with the resulting joys and pains of bloggy adolescence.
It seems a fitting way to help ramp up the festivities by showing people the way to the excellence Daily Kos was displaying in that first year, as the Iraq invasion moved past Mission Accomplished and into the on-the-ground reality that had been predicted on the blog for months: a never-to-be-successful mission.
One of the best Daily Kos writers on the war was Steve Gilliard, who had been named a guest blogger on April 3, 2003, due in part to his formidable knowledge and acute comments in this area. This diary links to Steve's front-page posts immediately after the first forty listed last time, and continues until June 6. Why June 6? Well, today is six days before the sixth anniversary—6/6—so it seemed as a good place to stop as any. When I was proceeding through every spring 2003 blog post to get the links to each of Steve's, the server suddenly refused to serve me any more posts when I tried moving on to June 7. I can take a hint. Can you?
Reading through the Daily Kos blog posts from 2003 is like a window into the history of our country as it was being made, seen through a progressive lens. Events that I'd forgotten, a vote or announcement that I hadn't remembered, a different perspective...a new picture emerges, or an old one comes into sharper focus, deeper understanding.
The blog posts can be meaty or breezy, detailed or just a quick announcement; the comments can be brief or even more interesting than the article that prompts them. It was their writing in comments that caused Markos to select Billmon; Steve Soto; Steve Gilliard; RonK, Seattle; Meteor Blades; and DHinMI to be guest bloggers for him; the later front pagers were likely selected more for their Daily Kos diaries under Scoop than earlier comments under Movable Type.
Steve Gilliard wrote interesting, detailed articles on the Iraq invasion, bluntly cataloguing the Bush Administration's mistakes and willful ignorance of history and its lessons. On May 3, 2003, he summarizes What we won in Iraq:
I've just finished Michael Beschloss's The Conquerors, a history of the decisionmaking behind the Occupation of Germany at the end of WWII. There was an intense, years long debate over the fate of Germany involving all of the major federal departments. It became a campaign issue in 1944. None of the kind of thinking behind that has been evidenced in our planning for iraq. Instead, we've done everything on the fly, hoping for the best and doing everything the hard way.
As a result, people are dead, we are resented and Iraqis are suffering. Liberation is not an excuse for anarchy. Which is what we have visited upon Iraq.
He also wrote about events in New York with a sharp eye. Although he was referring to the fallout should Rudy Giuliani run against Chuck Schumer or Hillary Clinton for their senate seats, read The banality of hypocracy, a blistering evisceration that starts with a newspaper report of Giuliani's marriage to Judith Nathan and proceeds to gut Giuliani as a person and Mayor and human being:
No one would mistake this blog for a wedding annoucements page, but it's rare to have such an act of evil described in such a banal way. It would be as if Bill Clinton gave away Monica Lewinsky at her wedding and the press reported that the former president gave away a White House intern he became friendly with.
Five years later, imagine Giuliani if his arrogance hadn't killed his presidential candidacy by February 2008, facing these liabilities later in the campaign.
The weekend of May 31 and June 1 was another Gilliard bonanza. I strongly recommend reading them all. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the excellent It's not only the WMD post that he started with:
The situation in Iraq is getting worse by the day and it's getting to the point where the commanders are not hiding their feelings. You have one division bear the brunt of some very heavy fighting and then you leave them to stew in the heat and mourn their dead.
The Bush Administration, after arrogantly ignoring and punishing our allies, expects them to offer gold and men for our occupation? Someone needs to tell Bush that the world is not like his daddy's friends. They feel no obligation to bail him out of a jam.
The article ends on an accurately prophetic note:
I will bet that Bush will look back at March as the best month he's ever had or is gonna have. Because things look bleaker by the day from here on out.
This is the third Top Comments diary on the Daily Kos writings of Steve Gilliard, one of the original group of guest posters on this blog, who died last June. Part 1 was published on March 19, and featured Steve's comments in the three weeks before he debuted on the front page. That time period, March 12, 2003 through April 2, 2003, started one week before the invasion of Iraq. Part 2, featuring his first fortnight of front page posts, was published on March 21.
As I noted in parts 1 and 2, there's nothing I can say about Steve Gilliard's writing that hasn't been said better by people who knew him well, and read him long before I became acquainted with his writing. I first found Daily Kos after he'd moved on to writing his own blog, so I didn't find his writing until much later.
The prime resource for Steve Gilliard's writings is at The Group News Blog. Go there and read.
Finding Steve Gilliard's work on Daily Kos has been difficult in that all the articles are at the archived, Movable Type (pre-Scoop) site...and that site has no way of distinguishing between authors of front-page posts. It also has no search capability. The same is true of comments: the comments are displayed in a separate window, and there isn't a way to externally link to a particular comment in the thread, only to the entire thread itself.
Access to Steve's writing on Daily Kos is improving. The dKosopedia has an article on Steve, and also sub-pages linking to many of Steve's front-page posts and to the comment threads he contributed to in the Movable Type era; these sub-pages are incomplete, but growing. They contain material from the previous two diaries on Steve's work, but also new material. For example, the links to Steve's comments between September 30, 2002, and January 24, 2003, are original to the dKosopedia. His comments in the last week of January 2003 should be available by tomorrow. There are also search strings for finding Steve's 1200 comments on the current site.
During the period covered in this diary, Steve shared the guest-posting reins with Ron K, Seattle, and would continue to do so until his final such posts on August 28, three weeks after his own blog had opened for business. Steve signed his posts "Steve Gilliard"; his comments were signed "steve gilliard" until late April 2003, when he changed to "steve_gilliard" (only his very first comment in 2002 used "sgilliard").
Steve Gilliard's front-page stories, April 21 through June 6, 2003:
Monday, April 21, 2003
• Part 2: The Intelligence Community and foreign policy also has 1 of 7 comments by Steve
• The Third Bubble? also has 2 of 123 comments by Steve using his long-established comment signature steve gilliard
Saturday, May 3, 2003
• Why should we have our future decided by others? What we won in Iraq also has 4 of 122 comments by Steve, using his recently changed comment signature steve_gilliard
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
• Osama's back also has 5 of 132 comments by Steve
• The truth about Jayson Blair also has 8 of 57 comments by Steve
Thursday, May 15, 2003
• A Security Agenda also has 2 of 35 comments by Steve
Friday, May 16, 2003
• On the road to Civil War also has 3 of 58 comments by Steve
Saturday, May 17, 2003
• George Bush raised your taxes also has 2 of 98 comments by Steve
• Life in the National Security State also has 4 of 35 comments by Steve
Sunday, May 18, 2003
• War is a force that gives us meaning also has 4 of 48 comments by Steve
Monday, May 19, 2003
• The war on terror also has 3 of 69 comments by Steve
• Our friends in Mexico also has 1 of 77 comments by Steve
Sunday, May 25, 2003
• Why not paying troops is a bad idea also has 1 of 29 comments by Steve
• The banality of hypocracy also has 8 of 76 comments by Steve (about Giuliani; think about pointing to this one)
Monday, May 26, 2003
• A land without consequences also has 4 of 121 comments by Steve
• Minor combat operations also has 2 of 26 comments by Steve
• Twenty years in a wall has no comments by Steve in the 11 posted.
• UN criticizes US demobilization plan also has 2 of 23 comments by Steve
Saturday, May 31, 2003
• It's not only the WMD also has 1 of 39 comments by Steve
• 'Pit bulls on a chain' also has 2 of 143 comments by Steve
• 'We simply didn't understand it.' also has 4 of 98 comments by Steve
Sunday, June 1, 2003
• Failure at Gitmo also has 1 of 28 comments by Steve
• A theory of idiocy also has 2 of 61 comments by Steve
• Secretary of Everything also has 1 of 32 comments by Steve
Thursday, June 5, 2003
• So why was Martha indicted? also has 8 of 89 comments by Steve
• Why the snipe hunt matters also has 2 of 66 comments by Steve
Friday, June 6, 2003
• UN team arrives in Iraq also has 1 of 80 comments by Steve
• No end in sight also has 1 of 93 comments by Steve
• Iraq Sunni cleric calls for jihad also has 3 of 55 comments by Steve
There have been other Top Comments diaries on the history of Daily Kos, and on posts and comments from the past six years. The dKosopedia's Daily Kos History page has links to these and other articles, plus a timeline. Articles of interest, arranged in approximate historical order, include:
• A brief history – A story by kos on how he came to build Daily Kos, published August 5, 2004.
• Top Comments: Markos Unleashed Edition – A diary by sardonyx listing all the posts in the first two weeks of Daily Kos, all by Markos, starting May 26, 2002.
• Top Comments: Pre-scoop Edition – A diary by taylormattd giving some highlights from the Movable Type days of Daily Kos.
• Top Comments: The Road to Scoop Edition – A diary by sardonyx on the events leading up to the introduction of Daily Kos on Scoop, and linking to posts and comments from the first evening of the Scoop site's existence.
• Top Comments: Scooping Daily Kos Edition – A diary by sardonyx on the first days of Daily Kos under Scoop, and the retirement of the Movable Type site.
• Top Comments: First Comments Edition – A diary by taylormattd reproducing the first comments made by Daily Kos denizens who later became well known, either here or at other blogs.
• Daily Kos Front Pagers – This dKosopedia article lists all the known Daily Kos front-pagers/guest bloggers/Contributing Editors from their introduction over seven months after the creation of Daily Kos, on January 3, 2003, through the present, with links to their first post as official front pagers. Also listed are guest writers (who didn't have to actually help run the site). The text has been expanded from two Top Comments diaries by sardonyx. See also the individual dKosopedia pages for the first three front-pagers: Billmon, Steve Soto, and today's featured writer, Steve Gilliard.
• A Brief History of DailyKos: The Great Leveling – A diary by dmsilev that examines the "growth and development of the user-diary community" of Daily Kos since the Scoop era began on October 13, 2003.
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We're making history every day here at Daily Kos, and celebrating the immediate past by highlighting top comments from the past 24 hours, as emailed to the TopComments mailbox, and found by your diarist du jour. Thanks to all Kossacks who took the time to mail in comments. If you saw any great comments that are not mentioned here—and there were over thirty-six thousand comments to choose from—please link to them in your own comments below. The address of that mailbox:
TopComments AT gmail DOT com
(change " AT " to "@" and " DOT " to ".")
Anyone can submit deserving comments to our address—the direct link to a comment is available from that comment's date/time—as long as they arrive by 9:30pm Eastern Time. Please always include your Daily Kos user name in the body of your message, so we can credit you properly. Both link and username are important.
Killer of Sacred Cows submitted the following nomination:
choochmac proposes a good strategy for dealing with the Obama = Muslim slander.
From jnhobbs:
In Code Breaker's diary, An entry from a Paranormal Investigating Kossack, Meteor Blades asks a practical question.
There were so many beautiful expressions of condolence and support in Devilstower's Eulogy for his father, but apostrophe's offering, What an honor, really touched me.
Sent by sofia:
DHinMI's brilliant, heartfelt comment on what a diverse country we are, and that when Obama is elected he will represent all of us. Posted in ChristieKeith's rec'ed diary, Obama adopted into the Crow Nation.
From kath25:
Who doesn't love the FP picture of Myrtle Strong Enemy? conlakappa has a fantastic comment on one of the many things that's so great about her.
crazyshirley sent this nomination (with wording by sardonyx):
In the illustrated diary Garry Kasparov and the Flying Penis (cue Anna Russell: "I'm not making this up, you know!"), there are many very funny (and highly risqué) comments. perro amarillo says damn glad mine can't fly, and droogie6655321 and others help the subsequent thread reach, um, new heights.
From Spathiphyllum:
In Adam B's diary Blog For McCain, Win Green Stamps! Crashing Vor created the perfect graphic for the occasion.
From your diarist sardonyx:
"The time for Republicans creating their own reality is over" is the spot-on conclusion of Dallasdoc's comment, The media is slow to change its narrative.
Hope Despite All writes an amazing rant that starts by asking "what kind of women are you to sit at home in November and allow John McCain to win?"...and then picks up speed.
In yet another discussion about Vice Presidential candidates, terryhallinan suggests someone in the Mother Jones mold, Zack from the SFV points out two major difficulties to this, one of which is constitutional, and WayneNight comes up with a suggestion around the constitutional problem, noting that there's a recent precedent.
Marie's first paragraph nails it.
A picture of the Straight-Talk Express going loco local.
AussieJo has the perfect topper to a thread that starts here with PM's comment on Kentucky electoral history.
In stefanielaine's front-paged diary McCain Recruiting Daily Kos Comment Trolls the fun just never stops, as witness DemocraticLuntz's first diary comment (you did notice the date, right?) and the unraveling thread below and throughout. Yes, Daily Kos really is on that McCain page. You just can't make this stuff up. (Well, you can, but somehow they always top your fiction with their reality. And, incredibly enough, my top comment nominations have just come full circle.)
No Top Comments diary would be complete without that day's top mojo—those comments which have received the highest number of recommendations from Daily Kos users like you. Today's top mojo is supplied by sardonyx, using his own revision of the amazing cskendrick's mojo-to-Excel magic.
First, Top Mojo excluding search-identifiable tip jars, first diary comments, and Cheers and Jeers:
1) Myrtle Strong Enemy, 101 by MAORCA — 335
2) Nope. When they say malignant glioma, by smm55 — 282
3) I'm so very sorry for your loss by Lisa Lockwood — 182
4) Thank you... from an old woman by KMcK SF — 179
5) Oh that's just great. by Rick in Oz — 170
6) Well Damn! by Getreal1246 — 141
7) If you rec this story, you go on the list. by unclejohn — 135
8) Yes, and I'll add by teyigdhk — 133
9) As a Native American woman by SheaG — 126
10) His name is "he who helps all people of the land" by bethcf4p — 123
11) Sweaters..... by juslikagrzly — 122
12) We're gonna make him Chinese next month, by Jacques — 116
13) Oh yeah. by stefanielaine — 116
14) Great idea by anastasia p — 101
15) These Photos Reinforce What an Incredibly Diverse by DHinMI — 101
16) You can tell the House to arrest Rove... by 3WaveRider — 94
17) I said one brain... not none brain (n/t) by Trix — 93
18) Given... by SlowNomad — 93
19) Let them say that by dansac — 92
20) If You Have 1 Brain to Bang Together by Gooserock — 91
21) There's a real reason he ain't there by Dana99 — 91
22) Myrtle Strong Enemy by Scarce — 88
23) GOD BLESS TED! by aaraujo — 87
24) That comment was from the diarist's 72 yo mom by ChristieKeith — 86
25) Please keep blogging this by Ivan — 86
26) Update: Don's appeal will be filed in a few days. by FishOutofWater — 86
27) That makes me want to cry. by CJB — 85
28) The power of computers... by Lava20 — 83
29) A beautiful tribute... by strengthANDwisdom — 82
30) If I never heard another word from Ferraro... by droogie6655321 — 82
Top Mojo with No Exclusions:
1) He shirt is still across the back of the chair by Devilstower — 824
2) Tips for Don Siegelman by FishOutofWater — 713
3) Rec if you think this story is important. by ohmproject — 633
4) give me some mojo by miasmo — 541
5) Tips for hope by Jerome a Paris — 505
6) Tips/Recs for the Millions of Female Obamiacs by Billary Redux — 496
7) mojo mug for those so inclined by teacherken — 348
8) What a pernicious piece of trash... by markthshark — 342
9) Myrtle Strong Enemy, 101 by MAORCA — 335
10) Nope. When they say malignant glioma, by smm55 — 282
11) Tip Jar by StevenLeser — 280
12) Tips for Senator Kennedy, a living legend by NCDem Amy — 280
13) tips and opposites... by jj24 — 279
14) Go Rep. Wexler by turneresq — 271
15) Tips/Recs for Elections by dansac — 258
16) That in the face of impossible odds, by PocketNines — 228
17) Lest this be forgotten amidst the election hubbub by Troutfishing — 202
18) I'm so very sorry for your loss by Lisa Lockwood — 182
19) Thank you... from an old woman by KMcK SF — 179
20) Oh that's just great. by Rick in Oz — 170
21) John McCain is our only hope. Vote McCain on by DemocraticLuntz — 164
22) I just tipped my wife... by droogie6655321 — 145
23) Well Damn! by Getreal1246 — 141
24) My first Tip Jar. by hi5enigma — 139
25) If you rec this story, you go on the list. by unclejohn — 135
26) As a Native American woman by SheaG — 126
27) His name is "he who helps all people of the land" by bethcf4p — 123
28) Sweaters..... by juslikagrzly — 122
29) We're gonna make him Chinese next month, by Jacques — 116
30) Oh yeah. by stefanielaine — 116
© sardonyx; all rights reserved
All quotes are the property of the original authors or the websites that held them