Again showing signs of increasing maturity, the Daily Kos community has implicitly separated itself from its angry “progressive” cousins at the Huffington Post.
You’ll recall that after yesterday’s attempt on Dick Cheney’s life, the HuffPo community unleashed a paroxysm of joy diminished only by the fact that Cheney did not die. Mike Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard spotted the comment thread first, and Michelle Malkin and I pretty much took it from there.
Since yesterday, the comment thread has been “disappeared” from the Huffington Post’s site much in the way Stalin “disappeared” Trotsky from official Soviet history or the way my grandmother “disappeared” philandering Uncle Izzy from our family photo albums. Fortunately for posterity’s sake, Michelle maintained a PDF of the entire comment thread before Arianna got around to disappearing it. Now, future generations will be able to gaze at the madness of the 21st century extreme left in its unfettered, unedited and unexpurgated glory.
ALTHOUGH YESTERDAY’S BLOGOSPHERIC EVENTS will probably disappear down the memory hole almost as rapidly as that HuffPo comment thread, I think it represented a fork in the road. The Hufftards went one way, the Daily Kos another.
Last night, a highly recommended Daily Kos diary titled, “We 100% Condemn the Attempted Assassination on Cheney” made its debut. Oh sure, some nitpickers might want to criticize the fact that it took the Kossacks 12 hours to issue such an obviously politic statement. But let’s be charitable – baby steps to sanity and respectability, no?
The comment thread is also instructive. Yes, many of the commenters said something to the effect of, “I’m happy he lived because I want Cheney tried as a war criminal!!!” Still, not a single one yielded to the Amanda Marcotte-like rage that seemed to be boiling inside of them and openly pined for his death like the Hufftards did. In other words, the comment thread was offensive but nowhere near as over-the-top offensive as what appeared on the Huffington Post.
The Daily Kos is becoming respectable. That’s not the same thing as saying that it is respectable. But still, don’t laugh. The Kossacks realize that the world is watching and are trying to act appropriately. They don’t quite understand how the normal world defines “appropriately,” but they’re gaining on it.
For all her money and even with that charming (albeit phony) accent, yesterday proved that Arianna will never be queen of the Nutroots. The Nutroots has only one regent, and his name is Markos.
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