KRISTOL: Every Democratic presidential nominee is going to the DailyKos convention. That?s the left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago. The Howard Dean kind of sponsor. Now the whole party is going to pay court to him and to left wing blogs. Not a single one is going to the Democratic Leadership Council meeting in a couple of weeks. That?s the organization that Bill Clinton was head of in the early ?90s ? that was supposed to be the new, more moderate Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has gone left and it will hurt them in 2008.
Forgetting for a moment that Kos isn't organizing YearlyKos, or is even the primary froce of the convention, hat's great news! The DLC is the big-money wing of the Democratic party, and big money already has enough representation in DC. Bloggers represent the people, the base of the party. That the candidates think they need to "court" the voters is a good thinkg.
Second...that the Democrats have moved left means they're finally approaching the center after their recent fearful rightward turn.
Sorry, chump. But given the radical and now objectively untrue political views that were "respectable" 3-4 years ago, I don't know if there's a higher compliment.
Some day soon -- and that day may even be right now -- being outside of what the Beltway Dingbats considered "respectability" during the greatest failure of political and journalistic conscience in American history will be a badge of honor and courage as coveted as the ability to claim membership in the French Resistance after World War II. You won't be able to survive politically without it.
Let's hope so, tho' methinks the media will do everything in its power to bury this American Resistance. After all, the media's part of what we were fighting against.
Personally, I think blogging, populism, and the drive for reform is living a precarious existance. There are a lot of powerful people who would like to just go back to the way things were in, oh, 1998, say. Once the Iraq War is over and the Bush administration evicted from office, they'll do everything to assure the folks that everything's okay.
Of course the previous status quo was what allowed the Bush administration to exist in the first place, and the usual powers enabled and abetted the worst of the administration's overreach. That's why it's likely we won't see impeachment unless we continue to clamor for it.
This is just a beginning. And the hard part's still to come.
