Kos and His Delusions

I have an account at DailyKos, which I haven't used in ages. I have been occasionally able to get them to rethink their support for some of Obama's positions. But lately they have just lost it, Markos himself posted the following cartoon, which isn't even funny. How childish can you get?

The Tea Partyers I know don't really care about gay marriage, less than half are active Christians, (even if I wish they all were), and I have never seen a hint of violence at a Tea Party rally. I know that I shouldn't have to say this, but occasionally we have to push back on this stupidity and hold it up for the ridicule it deserves.

More on Whole Foods and Engaging the Left

Some of you may wonder why I keep tabs on DailyKos and occasional other leftist type blogs. You may be surprised that it is not so much to see what they are up to, as to understand what type of arguments might get them to rethink their positions. Further, my libertarian leanings sometimes offer some common ground on which to launch a discussion.

A recent example was a recent DailyKos diary about Afghanistan that I found hard to understand the point. But a commenter made the point that the cost of war there would "break us." While I think that is hyperbole given Obama's 9 trillion, 10 trillion, heck it's only zeroes, deficits. But I do believe that the Vietnam War helped fuel inflation in the 70s and that the Iraq War has had negative economic consequences. So I commented that:

The stagflation of the 70s can be directly traced to the deficits we piled up fighting the Vietnam war. There is no doubt in my mind that the huge spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to our current economic mess.

This comment receive three positive ratings. But note that I have taken their reflexive anti-war attitude and introduced the concept that deficits hurt the economy. I'm not explicitly exploiting the opening, just prepping the battle space.



I recently received an email from a left of center blogger, Simon Owens, pictured, who thought my readers would be interested in how the left used social media to rally against Whole Foods. Please read his piece for yourself. Simon is a self styled media critic, but I note that he utterly uncritical and provides no counter point to the boycott organizers' perspective. Two quotes:

“[The op-ed] lit a fire under me,” Rosenthal said. “This person was using his company as a sort of Trojan horse for a bunch of discredited, bad ideas that we have said no to over and over again.

They’ve begun posting user-submitted photos from people who are taking pictures of receipts from other grocery stores they’re shopping at and on the blog they’re listing boycott events that are taking place around the country. But they’re doing very little to actually organize these individual events.

I noted in a previous post, I quoted a DailyKos piece as to how some on the left itself realize how fickle they themselves are. If you read Simon's post, you will see that even this initial modest success lacked much energy. To quote KT from the comments:

In any case, the guy's post boils down into this: "We're a bunch of children."

But I still seek to persuade, because it keeps me sane thinking that ultimately not everyone on the left is insane.

Commenting at Daily Kos

Give him credit, the partisan attack dog pictured at left has built one of the most successful blog sites in American politics, left, right or otherwise. I am referring of course, to Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of Daily Kos. I periodically read his blog and occasionally comment, but more as a social experiment than in the expectation of changing hearts and minds. I keep ratcheting up the extremism of my comments in the hopes that they will recognize the parody, so far to no avail. My latest comments actually earned me ratings as an excellent commenter from the Daily Kos crowd.

So I need some help. Read my comments and some replies below and let me know if the Daily Kos commenters have such a lack of irony that I will never get through or should I change tactics.

First the context. Kos (Markos Moulitsas) posted as how Obama's desire for bipartisanship had been a PR disaster on the stimulus package:

Yeah, I know there were those who thought that Obama's obsession with "bipartisanship" was some sort of clever master plan to outflank Republicans or something, but in reality, the obsession with getting Republican votes ended up detracting from the selling of the stimulus itself to the American people.

My comments follow. (You can read the whole thing in context at the link above. You can find my left wing doppleganger by clicking "View Comments" and page searching for BDaddyL. Not very original, but when I picked it, I was in a hurry to comment, kind of like Pop's Datsun joke.)

Why Can't We Just Start Jailing Republicans? by BDaddyL

How does the Republican party differ from a criminal conspiracy under the RICO act? They just act to repay key donors and have a revolving door between government, lobbyists and recipients of their favors. They have lost all rights to have a voice in government. If that doesn't qualify as a criminal syndicate, I don't know what does. With leading rethugs in jail (let's start with Rush Limbug) we can enforce the policies this country needs without all this crap about bipartisanship.

In fairness, despite my good ratings for this post, I think I may have finally hit a nerve. Here is jqb's response:

This is still a democracy, not a fascistic state. People aren't guilty just because some label applies to them -- you can only convict individuals who have been proven to have participated in an illegal conspiracy.

However, one commenter (Troubador) had no moral issue. His response:

Because it would look bad by Troubador.
Sorry, reality is a lot of work.

But I note that no one ever challenges my premise that Republicans are basically criminals. So what do you think, is it worthwhile to influence the debate on the other side by parodying their extremism or should I let it go? (Some days it's too much fun.) I look forward to your comments.