I got home tonight and discovered that Atrios and Armando had linked to my article about Daily Kos. I also discovered that Markos was under the impression I was pissed off at him and had no idea why. First, by way of disclosure. I know Atrios. I drank beers with him just last Tuesday. I’ve never met Armando but we have exchanged emails for a long time. I feel like I know him. I consider both of them my friends. They both know where I’m coming from. I don’t know Markos at all, and that may be why he doesn’t know where I’m coming from.
I am not pissed off at Markos. I am frustrated that every time something happens on Daily Kos that someone doesn’t like they take the issue over here to discuss it. People might expect me to enjoy this since it increases the traffic and profile of the site. But I don’t like it.
How would I feel if there was some site where I was routinely pilloried, and a friend of mine was the publisher? It wouldn’t feel good. It would be awkward. I might want my friend to stop publishing things that besmirched my reputation.
Daily Kos is a huge and influential blogsite. What goes on there is very important. It’s inevitable that major events there will be discussed. It’s inevitable that controversial statements by the front-pagers there will cause commentary, rebuttal, and ill-feelings. We all know the list:
Clark/Dean
The mercenaries
Ohio Fraud
Donna Brazile
Gannon/Guckert
The Pie Wars
The Hippies
The Conspiracists
My disillusionment was over voter fraud. It made me angry. It motivated me to create this site. Other members have come here for other reasons, often nursing some wounds. I’ve never banned anyone for discussing their grievances. I share some of them. What I have done is to point out that I am not really very happy with some of the more personal attacks. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s not what I want this site to be about, or be defined as. Yet, I don’t want to make a policy against criticizing Daily Kos. I really aim to allow as much free speech as possible, and try to control it through insisting on respectful discourse.
Armando acknowledeged that a lot of the critiques here have merit. But a lot of them are very harsh and some of them have very little merit. I wrote my diary to try to allow people to make their critiques so that maybe we could purge this division out of our system for a while. I frankly do not care whether Cindy Sheehan is put on a pedestal, or not, over at Daily Kos. What does that have to do with this site? It should have nothing to do with this site, and yet it spawned endless comments about how terrible Daily Kos is, and the crowd there is, and Markos is. You know what? That makes me uncomfortable. The Frog Pond is dedicated to electing democrats and exposing corruption and criminal activity. It’s about frog-marching the thieves out of the White House and Congress. That is what motivates me.
When Daily Kos turned the other cheek on the election it made me mad. I got over it by doing something about it. I didn’t write a bunch of stories about how betrayed I felt and try to drive a wedge between the sites. I started this site with some different rules that I thought would correct some of the things I didn’t like about Daily Kos.
In any case, I’m struggling to say that I am unhappy that this site has so often become an outlet for bashing Daily Kos at the same time that I am unwilling to really do anything other than bitch about it to prevent it from continuing.
I’m not mad at Markos, or at Daily Kos. I’m just frustrated.
