Dan Balz's outlook on life may be too sunny and stable to regularly read Markos Moulitsas's Daily Kos. That would explain why Balz fails to describe the far-left venom that powers the Kossacks in his account of their Las Vegas conference, Bloggers' Convention Draws Democrats. If Balz had provided some excerpts from Moulitsas's website, it would help explain why every one of the 20-odd candidates they've backed for national office office has lost. But he doesn't mention that either.
In short, we learn about concern by people like Moulitsas that the Daily Kos and its netroots activists are unfairly being typecast as populated with the lunatic fringe:
But Moulitsas said the movement has been miscast as a collection of young, far-left activists by Washington-based Democratic consultants, Republicans and elected officials.
"I think Democratic politicians -- I don't know whether slowly or quickly -- are realizing that we aren't these far-leftist, naïve and young political extremists, that we're actually a fairly representative cross-section of the Democratic Party and we don't have an agenda other than seeking strong Democratic voices."
Strong Democratic voices can be found, if only you will look, in a variety of Daily Kos "diaries" written by members of that community. Among the diaries featured on the home page this morning is The Abyss Looks Back by one "edencho," which according to a Daily Kos editor "walks the line of the overwrought without crossing over." Among edencho's observations (edited with asterisks for language):
Blindness is a modern American tradition. I was once blind myself until the day that the scales fell from my eyes and I was finally able to see the entire system for what it truly is - a passel of interrelated myths, fallacies and outright lies. The system you see is designed to suppress any individual thought; keep you bewildered and buying commodities, consumer goods and a accpting a colossal line of bullsh** as truth...
The simple fact is that the majority of the boiling frogs that are Americans are unable to comprehend even the most rudimentary concepts that they are living a meticulously fabricated lie... Our society is a perfect example of the slaves in the great allegory of Plato's cave, today's Americans have undergone such a successful collective electronic lobotomy that they are completely unable to understand that their entire lives are nothing more than carefully formulated and constructed illusions,..
We are in that concentration camp of the mind now, we have been for quite some time and God help us all for what we have become in the aftermath of that terrible Tuesday in September 2001 when the gates of hell swung open and beckoned us to step inside. We were driven insane by our thirst for vengeance, deceived by our leaders into undertaking wars of conquest wrapped in the bloody cloak of righteous revenge and the always underlying but unspoken crusade for the cross, divided into factions and pitted against our very own families, friends and neighbors all under the watchful eye of a surveillance state controlled by monstrously insane war-hungry immoral men with a terrifying vision for the future.
Alrighty then--thank goodness we didn't cross over the line of the overwrought.
As I say, these aren't hard to find; when blogging is slow the likes of Charles Johnson dip into the Kossacks for some refreshment. Johnson recently pointed to a couple of shall we say frank Don't Support Our Troops diaries. Half Of You Will Hate Me For This by "artofstarving" may be about right on the numbers, judging from the comments. But the key for people trying to win elections based on support from the Kossacks is that half of them don't Hate Him For This. Artofstarving writes:
All this carefully calculated discussion of Zarqawi's death is revealing just what a dialectical stranglehold the Right has over us right now. It's great that a scumbag like that is dead, lord knows he deserves to rot in hell, but do we have to pour it on extra thick just to satisfy the Right's bloodlust? Just to prove that We Support the Troops too?..
So this is my plea to fellow liberals. We should not fear conservatives. It's time to take a stand and grow a pair. Fu** it! I'll say it! I don't support the troops. Not the ones in Haditha. Not the ones in Guantanamo. And definitely not the ones at the Pentagon. To the grunts on the ground I hope you return safely and soon but that doesn't mean I approve of what you're doing there. I'm sorry you're being ordered to kill and create chaos; I know it's not your fault, but regardless, I don't support it....Look them in the eye and ask them "do you support torture? Illegal invasions? Massacres?
And Support No Troops, well, I guess that's pretty clear, but let "blueness" elaborate:
True, many of these volunteers have been in some way coerced. But, because they are volunteers, they should be afforded the opportunity to at any time volunteer to opt out.
Those who oppose the war in Iraq but who nonetheless feel compelled to express "support" for "our troops" might reflect that, without those troops, there would be no war. Those volunteers who remain are advancing what the French journal Liberation has correctly identified as George II's "theocracy and pathocracy": "a worldview that is intrinsically paranoid, imbued with visions of the most regressive Crusades, drenched in a frightening symbolism that sees any external opposition as evidence of crime and in which every decision and every action bear the seal of a vengeful divinity."...
As I say, there's a reason the Kossacks are about 0-20, not that readers of Balz's story will know about the 0-20, or about the reason.
Cross-posted at PostWatch
