Do many of you like me have a love/hate relationship with the blogs that you correspond on? Even at times with our beloved DKos?
Well, yesterday I had a real personal hate fest with DKos. Hell. Let me be blunter. With most of you Kossacks.
I wrote a long, carefully thought out diary talking about the drift towards the further wars that are part of the neocon agenda. Don't bother looking at it if you have the same attention span and grade reading level of George Bush. It's not a diary for you.
The simple, highlighted message was
"I believe that we must keep this journey to war charted and visible in the spotlight of DKos, the media and our fellow citizens."
The suggestion was that we should use some of the excellence applied to the analysis of Guckert/Gannon to try and analyse these steps towards more terror raining down from the skies as they are taken.
95% of the 21 people who answered the poll agreed with the question "Should we have an on-going diary that charts this journey to war?" The diary itself got 31 Recommends from those among the writers on here that I most admire.
So what's the beef? It's because the rest of you let it slip out of view before it had a full airing. An hour in the Recent Diary list and then out of sight and out of mind.
"Better title and clear instructions", was the sensible suggestion of a couple of supportive posters.
Fine. But I am not a journalist with the ability to write attention grabbing headlines. Nor will this story give you photos of eight inch erections grabbed off someone's blog to get sufficient of your attention for the diary to stay visible for more than a single coffee break.
You can have photos of a little child pleading with the blood of her parents all over her hands or all those others posted by RubDMC on the Iraq War Grief Daily Witness diary. You'll have to connect your own dots.
I'm like the majority of you. Just someone who lives and votes in a country that is sending its young and not so young people to their deaths whilst creating a hell for others just like you and me in their countries, that we have never visited and whose location on the map we barely know.
I can't give clear instructions on how we proceed either. I'm just a baffled blogger not a trained foreign relations political analyst. It's just that I, like the 21 others who responded to the diary, care more than these gin soaked, self-important over paid professionals and we are less afraid to say what the hell is going on.
We need our fellow citizens to put down the football sections of their newspapers for a second and become momentarily aware of what is going down in their name.
This is not going to be easy. As Wickerman posted "Necessary, to be sure, but man... Daunting, to say the least."
Let's be clear. I don't give a rats-arse if discussing the wars that are to come bores the will to live out of the majority here. I'm not going to let Bush and his gang grease the slide for us to slip into more death and destruction as he did last time.
I'm going to try and make sure that contributions like Zenbowl's excellent diary "Did North Korea Screw China? Hardly." gets more than one comment and three recommends in its fifteen minutes on the front page.
If those of us prepared to put in the work only end up with questions like those posed in cyclonejim's diary "war talk: iran, but why?" then that's O.K. We can flood the news media with these questions. We can throw them out to all our political representatives to get some answers. What we won't do is let the complexity allow us to let these questions go unasked.
So like it or not, you are going to get a regular diary on this subject and calls to action which I hope those of you who care will make worthwhile by contributing to it.
It will keep its dull title of Charting the Journey to War. It won't be an easy read and don't expect startling revelations.
The only guarantee is that it will keep DKos alert to the biggest threats to world peace that are happening right now.
Deserving of this are a million little girls playing out there in the streets of Mashhad, Isfahan, Shiraz, Hamedan, Tabriz, Ahwaz, Rasht, and in the streets of Yazd, Kerman, Bandar Abbas, Sari and Zahedan and in the streets of P'yo;ngyang, Namp'o, Hamhung-Hungnam, Ch'ongjin, Kaesong, Sinuiju, Wonsan, P'yongsong, Sariwon, Haeju, Kanggye, Hyesan, Sunch'on, Tanch'on, Tok-ch'on, Anju, Kimch'aek, Kusong, Huich'on, Sinp'o. Their only worries right now are what their mothers have ready for their suppers and what that shiny metallic bird is that flies high over their house regularly in the afternoon once a week.
You don't know where these places are? Don't worry. I hadn't heard of Mosul, Fallujah, Karkuk. Karbala and Najaf until George Bush published his travel guide.
You will get to know these places soon enough.