I first found out about the now infamous 'Romney Tape' on or about August 24th.
The first portion I saw was the 'Chinese Factory' snip, and, as the plight of the workers in the factories that make all our cheap crap for next to nothing is a cause dear to my heart I immediately began putting together a diary. My computer was a tangle of open tabs as I did my research, hoping to put up a decent diary on Romney's comments.
Then, I found something weird: the video had been posted to a fake Rachel Maddow account on YouTube. I started to find comments on other sites questioning the authenticity of the tape.
I deleted my work in progress, and became one of the doubters.
As the various snippets of Romney's remarks began to appear, I became concerned: why the fake Maddow account, why hasn't any 'official' media source taken it up, etc.
As much as I wanted it to be true, as I said in one comment over the past few weeks "My 'Breitbart Sense' is tingling!." I had visions of a 'Dan Rather' coming back to bite us in the ass if we ran with it while so many questions existed.
My thinking went back to the old "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
I think for me, as well as many others who pushed back against running with the videos, a sense of protection for our beloved Kos kicked-in. The nature of the remarks was so damning that I thought 'we sure as hell better be right on this one!'
I only dropped one 'donut' - that on the day of the endless 'spamming' of pieces of the tape - but I did engage in more than one discussion about the wisdom of going with the tapes while there were so many unanswered questions.
I haven't read all the comments on all the threads about this issue, but, for the most part what I saw was an honest debate about how to handle the issue.
That's what sets us apart from many other sites. We can have open discussions without 'HR mania flame wars.'
I got my most heated about 24 hours ago, and I kinda 'called-out' a diarist with a 500,000 plus UID whose account was created less than a week before the Rachel Maddow situation and authored only one diary, which was about the tapes. I promised a 'mea culpa' if I was wrong, so here it is.
I as well as others appear to have been totally wrong on this, so I apologize for the times when I pushed my rhetoric beyond civility. That said, I don't apologize for expressing my sincere doubts about the issue when I did: in my mind, that's what DailyKos is about. It's our duty to question when we truly believe questions are required.
(I was even worried when Ben LaBolt and Lis Smith were tweeting about it. Romney pretty much confirmed that it's all legit in his presser.)
Anyway, more than anything, I'm sooo glad it all turned out to be true.