The shame of western Oklahoma, The Oklahoman newspaper, has a semi-regular feature called "Monday Morning Quarterbacks," which mostly just reviews conservative voices. The only time they quote liberals or progressives is to mock or refute them. Like today:
CURDLE YOUR YERDLE
The Left Wing is playing for keeps this election cycle. The king of liberal/progressive blogging, Markos Moulitsas rallies the troops at dailykos.com with his own adaptation of Knute Rockne. Libs must "do everything necessary allowable under the law to win because elections have consequences," he writes. "This isn’t about who is most pure, but about taking the fight to the enemy ... and fighting fire with fire." Later Kos writes about having the "killer instinct," rubbing salt in conservatives’ wounds and forcing them to go into debt. What’s next, burning their villages?
Umm...project much?
Here's the front-page post they are quoting from:
Break their spirits - (posted Oct. 16)
and here's fuller context (and nothing like this would EVER be published in The Oklahoman, I guarantee you!):
Movement progressives realize that we must do everything necessary allowable under the law to win because elections have consequences. This isn't about who is most pure, but about taking the fight to the enemy and aggressively embracing progressivism, offering clear contrasts between us and them, and fighting fire with fire. There's no ambiguity about where I belong.
So to my fellow movement progressives, embrace that killer instinct and let's finish the job. We've got conservatives demoralized and on the run. They are retrenching around their most important voices. So let's pick off those they've left exposed and go after their best defended leaders as well. Let's get rid of John Shadegg and Mitch McConnell and Liddy Dole and the rest of them. Leave them leaderless, and susceptible to takeover by the Evangelical Right that so freaked out Wall Street conservatives during the primaries (when Huckabee was briefly in the lead).
Let's run up Obama's margins in the Blue states and narrow them in the Red states to give Obama a huge, unmistakable national mandate. Let's win states Bush won by 20 points or so in 2004, like Indiana, Montana and North Dakota, to rub salt in their wounds. Let's keep forcing them to go more and more into debt, so that they emerge from the election with their coffers drained, heavily in debt.
Some of these races are featured on our O2B page, most are not. We can only do so much in our little corner of the political world. But there are a lot of people out there fighting the good fight, in a movement that spans online, offline, union and non-union, wealthy and not-so-wealthy, professional and volunteer, black, white, brown, and every shade in between, male and female, in all 50 states and DC.
So if you can give, give to your favorite campaigns. If you can't give, donate an afternoon of your time and help out at the local political office phonebanking or canvassing or however else you can contribute to the cause. If you can do both, do both.
Leave everything on the road.
As a proud progressive stuck with being in The Oklahoman's media market, I have to tell you that I am now even more enraged at the newspaper's editorial and news blacklisting of left-leaning ideas (I'd say about 2% of our events are ever mentioned in print, and then it may be with a negative twist).
Apparently the paper's staff reads liberal voices, but doesn't want their readers to do so.
Those of you in the other states can help the mis-served folks of Oklahoma by helping Andrew Rice lick Jim Inhofe in two weeks. I think that will send a shock wave that will make profound changes for us here.
Update:
A couple of comments have noted that the Oklahoman could well be doing the netroots a favor, by telling their readers about Daily Kos (which will lead them to other subversive sites [by OK standards]). So thanks, Oklahoman, and keep reading!