Last night on the NBA finals thread, DCDemocrat mistakenly thought it was a general open thread and posted
this comment:
One recommended diary tonight (4.00 / 10)
predicted that dkos would bring down the Bush Administration. A second recommended diary predicted that the Hastert-Delay House would vote articles of impeachment against George Bush.
Has anyone checked the community's reality-based community credentials recently?
Markos agreed that...
I'd been thinking about the cavalcade of fanciful diaries myself, especially the variety described by DCDemocrat, that seem to completely disregard the fact that it would take a deeply conservative and corrupt Republican House to impeach a deeply conservative and corrupt Republican President, who if he were impeached would be replaced by a deeply conservative and corrupt Republican Vice President. In other words, the chances of this happening are somewhere along the lines of me hitting a flock of flying monkeys on my way to the office tomorrow morning.
Quick, reality check, did you just try to craft a quip about how I might actually hit a flying monkey tomorrow morning? If so, you're part of the problem.
And there is a problem. We have too many people believing in fantasy. We have people more obsessed with thinking Mitkofsky is in cahoots with Rove than worrying about whether their local election clerk is competent and getting off their butts to do something to make sure their local elections are conducted fairly. We have people more obsessed with boycotting the Washington Post because Dana Milbank was mean to John Conyers than getting off their butts to register voters for next year. We have people obsessed with calling anyone who doesn't want a Stalinist purge of the Democratic party a "Vichy Democrat" than getting off their butts and attending their first meeting of their local, county or Congressional Democratic party organization.
I was thinking about this when I saw DCDemocrat's comment, and it hit me: Daily Kos has been infiltrated by Republican dirty tricksters.
It's Karl Rove's fault.
Think about how easy it would be for the Republicans to screw up the blogs, especially those run on Scoop that allow people to post diaries. All they would have to do is start posting crazy-ass conspiracy theories, and then get people to help them "game the system" by recommending the diaries (where that's an option), or at least posting scads of fawning comments and encouragement for people to think along the same lines. It's a great way to distract people from getting off their butts and doing things that matter, and tainting sources of news and discussion like Daily Kos with the ridiculous, the fanciful, the destructive and the demonstrably false. That way the people who rely on this site to be informed, engaged and inspired would be disillusioned and fade away, or distracted and diverted from what's important.
So what should be done?
Those who care about Daily Kos need to step up and take responsibility. They need to, at a minimum, stop recommending diaries that, as Markos and DCDemocrat discussed, call into question the place's reality-based credentials. When those diaries are recommended, they need to wade into the threads and ask the questions that are ignored or obfuscated in the diary. They need to look at new diaries and recommend diaries that are worthy, and pose the hard and revealing questions about those that aren't. And everyone needs to stop being so gullible.
If you care about being associated with the reality-based community, it's up to you.