If anyone missed
this over-the-top diary, which villifies Chuck Schumer as our enemy, please read it. It's a perfect example of how our side has self-destructed in the past because some have preferred ideological purity to genuine, sometimes pragmatic results. It also made me realize that, along with trolls, concern trolls, and purity trolls, this site must be on the look out for what I would like to term
"Circular Firing Squad Trolls".
This diarist's starting point is
Pachacutec of Firedoglake's piece, "12 Reasons Not to Trust Chuck Schumer", which lists fair reasons to be wary of Schumer after his tenure as head of the DSCC. I think pieces like Pachacutec's are important and necessary after an election, even ones we have won, so that we can review what worked and what did not work and try to make any necessary adjustments. But while Pachacutec is very critical of Schumer, I read his piece less as an attempt to annihilate Schumer than as a pushback. Pachacutec explains his intentions as follows:
Instead, we're fighting the post election narrative the DC/K Street Elitists are promoting because it's a lie about what happened in Tuesday's election designed to disempower you, dear reader. We fight this fight so you can get the credit you deserve. If we can successfully fight their false narrative, they have no public justification to sell you out over the next two years.
Pachacutec wants to insure that the Netroots get their proper due and, for that, I wholeheartedly agree.
The author of this diary instead took Pachacutec's piece to mean that Chuck Schumer is our "enemy," a term usually reserved for entities like Al-Qaeda or by people like Coulter, Hannity, or Limbaugh to use against us, their fellow Americans. While many on the Right and even within our own party would like to portray DailyKos as loudmouthed extremists, I know from my own experience as a member for the last 2 1/2 years that is not the case, at least not for the majority of us. How in the world could we be extremists when we actively backed candidates like Tester and Webb - the two candidates that gave us the Senate - before the party establishment even knew they existed?
While some would like to label such a diarist a purity troll, I believe such a diary goes beyond wanting "purity" to the point of being blindingly destructive, both to our own party as well as to the image of this site. It fosters a mindset that mirrors Bush/Cheney/Rove's theme of "You're-Either-With-Us-Or-Against-Us." Many in the media want to portray many of our new Congressmen as moderate, even conservative, and claim that the new Democratic Majority must be more moderate than in the past. To some degree they're right, but the incoming majority has to be more moderate compared to those currently in power. The Democratic Party to which the MSM is comparing our flesh-and-blood Congressmen and Senator-elects is the fantastical "Democrat Enemy" caricature the Wingnut slime machine has created to maintain power. Diarists like the one to which I refer do nothing but feed into such a misconception.