Warning: this is an uncharitable, venting rant.  I am angry, and to give you an idea, we are headed to Rude Punditville.  Stop right now if you don't want to read it.  Awhile back, I wrongly made a premature case for how Hillary Clinton needed to be talked about in order to give her supporters an easy transition into the fold.  I was wrong.  Some things trump.  So if you don't like harsh language or are a tenderheart, click away now.  I don't even particularly want this to be rec'd, just on the record.

What follows is a totally incomplete list of people who must speak up immediately and clearly, or it's on them too.  Silence + standing endorsement equals ratification.

In no particular order:

Paul Krugman.  Krugman, you weaselly motherfucker, you better ask for some forgiveness without the slightest goddamn snide remark.  

Tina Fey.  Tina, you exhorted voters to elect this goddamn horrorshow.  You have terrible judgment and you need to apologize for what you tried to bring about through your advocacy.

[From the Frog Pond]

I've seen it in the sincere questions of anna in philly and in the snide remarks of Armando.  There is this idea out there that Hillary Clinton should stay in the race just in case Barack Obama's campaign implodes and it appears that he is totally unelectable by the time the nominating convention takes place at the end of August.  

So, I've really spread out as of late to different blogs then DKos in an effort to become better acquainted with the various opinions which are out there.  I don't believe as many seem to that DKos is 'Obama central'; I suppose they can't remember the amazingly long period in which John Edwards was the clear favorite of most of the posters here, and every day seemed to have nothing but Edwards diaries on the Rec list.  After he dropped out the majority of his support went to Obama on Dkos, true; but that is reflected in the electorate at large, so I'm not sure why people are surprised by this!

    I have no proof for this, but I heard it through the grapevine. So here we are.

    It makes a terrible kind of sense, when you think about it. You have Super Trial Lawyer, who wants a Super Baby, so he seeks out Super Establishment Woman and they have a "super time" together (koff koff).

    Now Obama is Junior Superman, by all accounts. So it fits. And all the Oedipal rivalry starts to make sense now, doesn't it?

    I just have to say, though: wait until Obama reads this diary, and, face twisted by shock, goes to seek John Edwards, who while wielding a red lightsaber and speaking through a black mask, says, "Barack, I am your father."

    You know it'll happen.

Shakespeare's fools speak truth to power and are so allowed because they are fools. It is their job. It is why they are loved and trusted. It is given that they will say to their employers what others dare not say, just as it is given that their employers will hear them, even when angered by what they are hearing. In no play is this more evident than in King Lear. The Fool, in Lear, derides and berates his king, angering him almost as much as has his wise and foolish favorite daughter, Cordelia. At her death, his heartbreaking lament even begins by referring to her as his "poor fool," because she, alone with Gloucester and his official Fool, loved him enough to tell him what others wouldn't. For their honesty, Cordelia and Gloucester were banished. For his, the Fool was kept by the king's side. Because the king listened to none of them, they all shared the same fate.

    Our pal ARMANDO writes away in the Guardian again, Blogging the party line: Do netroots activists want to fight the current occupant of the White House - or merely submit to the Democratic party's agenda to elect the next one?  
    He says some interesting stuff about Obama's failure to oppose Alito, but then says Matt Bai's

...discussion of Matt Stoller's process of deciding to support the challenge to Lieberman is almost surreal, as if the involvement of Stoller, Jane Hamsher and even Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas, was necessary to drive the challenge to Lieberman. ...
Today the netroots faces a new challenge of avoiding being seen as a top-down driven movement. This month is a pivotal time in the fight to end the Iraq debacle. Yet organizations like MoveOn and netroots "leaders" like Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers are more interested in launching campaigns for the 2008 elections than in organizing to pressure today's Democrat-controlled congress to do all it can to end the Iraq war now, during the Bush presidency. ...

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If you want to remain anonymous, your best bet is to stop blogging altogether.  Actually, even that isn't enough.  Google your name sometime, just to see what's there.  You may be surprised.

But I want to use this diary space to ask a larger and more important question: if we recognize the new access to information that the internet provides, where does that take us, as a community?  Where should that take us?  

Peter Beinart and Armando have been engaging in a debate over foreign policy and national security over at Swords Crossed. For those of you who are not familiar with Peter Beinart, he is "is a journalist and editor-at-large for The New Republic, having served as editor of TNR from November 1999 until March 2006." He is a graduate of Yale and a Rhodes Scholar. In understanding Beinart, it is helpful to understand the history of the The New Republic.

Yesterday Armando called for "someone less flammable" than him to take up the problem of race on the left and on this site specifically.  While I recognize that "less flammable" than Armando describes a lot of people, I felt that call was specifically directed at me.  Like Armando, I am a Kossack with an obviously Latino username who is often appalled by the level of discourse on race at this site and on the left generally.  I've studied the subject academically and I've lived my life as a brown Latino-identified person raised in the south Denver suburbs, aka Tancredo Country who went to college and law school in well-known liberal havens.  So I've seen racial attitudes in the conservative suburbs and the liberal college towns, and I don't think there is a tremendous amount of difference.  This is my small attempt to try to advance the discussion in this liberal community.

Since I just read Armando's diary of today http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/17/104730/413 (linky no worky?) and he asked for people to pick-up the cause of race, I thought I'd throw some things together that I had written in the weeks after Katrina - which was the event that got me to 'the blog world' and dKos.

I noted that Armando's diary had over 300 hundred comments within minutes vs. the other recommended diaries.  While some of that attention may be due to his authorship and reknown, it says a lot about just using the word 'race' in a headline!

Note to Armando - "Talk" is good, action and intermixed life-experience of Americans of different race over time, is better, and ultimately, there will always be a certain unextinguishable tension between races and classes.  There is some primal (defective) defensive-instinct trigger that most human groups seem to have.

So, in an effort to be timely, these are just fragments of thought and not really re-edited (except like when I had wr
itten back then that Bush wasn't 'evil'), here goes...

     Hmmmm. ...

     In any case: I wonder if we can get Mel Gibson to become a Democrat, or at least a friendly independent. (His father, while perhaps a crazed anti-Semite, did move the family to Australia to...protest the Vietnam War!) Any ideas on how to get MGib to the light side of the Force?

     (Note: I see Armando has now responded to my comment in his diary re the above; but now I've prepared this diary, may as well use it...)

From Swords Crossed:

Make room for me:

(I]ts Left representative, Armando from Kos, is a timid mouse, and the Right representative, Tacitus, is a spectacularly dishonest trolling-artist whose specialty is longwinded diversions that fatigue his opponent into submission. What we have here then is the blogging equivalent of Hannity & Colmes; in this case the Hannity figure is marginally more intelligent and ever-so-slightly less vituperative, but such matters little when the Colmes figure, who is admittedly and admirably fine at the kung-fu of wonkery, is still such a pushover when it comes to direct clashes with certain ideological enemies who argue in massive bad faith.

Okaaay. So Alan, what are the perks at Faux again?

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Mo Pitkins
34 Avenue A
Telephone: 212-777-5660

The meetup time is 5:30 on the 2nd floor. The reservation is in my real-life name, Lois, so if you get there and are feeling lost, ask the staff where to send you to get to us. (I may actually be late cause my son has a baseball game so wonderful Kossak and longtime meetup attendee TheMaven has agreed to play early-arrival host.)

Email me (see profile) if you want me to put you on the list for future meetups. Note: I do not use the email list for any other purpose.

More below

i'm creating my own diary rescue service.

i'm basically rescuing my own diary on my own blog.

i explain after the jump:

First, here are my bona fides in terms of attacking Lieberman and standing up for the Democratic Party brand.  I went to Connecticut to meet Ned Lamont a few months ago, I did a fair amount of research on CT state politics, I gave $500 to Lamont, I've attacked issue groups that support Lieberman and I met with the DSCC to see what their plans are.  I just reported today that Dean won't back Lieberman if he runs as an independent.  Lieberman is an outrageously bad man, and I've put my time, my money, and my effort where my mouth is.

More on the flip.