I don't know if this is going to be met well, but I've been stirring this around in my head for a couple days, so here goes:
Over the last four months, I've had the great honor of being able to post on the website of the incomparable Digby. She is a credit to our movement and absolutely essential to building a progressive America.
She's now being attacked because she won an online poll and appeared in an ad two years ago.
Really.
We need to stop the self-cannibalization of the progressive movement. Right now.
Women's Voices Women's Vote fucked up with their robo-calls in dozens of states this year. They obviously have some research that suggests reaching voters and getting them to register is at a peak during the height of a primary election, but the tactics used were confusing and potentially disenfranchising. I won't defend them.
What I will defend to my last breath is the honor and integrity of members of the progressive blogosphere, particularly Digby, who have been caught up in this scandal and had all sorts of bad motives imputed toward her. Now, let's look at the facts.
Digby participated in a PSA last year encouraging women to register to vote. Unmarried women vote Democratic by about 3-to-1 and yet are one of the hardest subgroups to get registered to vote. The idea of participating in a drive to make that happen is not just laudatory, it's essential to Democratic chances in November and beyond. At the time, WVWV was nothing more than a well-known organization dedicated to register women to vote. She appeared in the ad mainly because the production company making it was local.
Later, WVWV ran an online poll for their readers' favorite female blogger. Digby won. She actually didn't get anything in recognition of this victory; no trophy, no blue ribbon, no nothin'. Hopefully a little traffic and exposure, which I think we all would grant is deserved.
So, based on (a) doing an unpaid spot in a PSA years before the fact and (b) winning an online poll, she is now being inundated with emails and attacked throughout the blogosphere for being some kind of Hillary shill linked to a voter suppression unit. Got that?
I'm quite certain that Obama supporters (present company INCLUDED) didn't like it when Jeremiah Wright was made to stand in for the candidate, that his worst utterances were portrayed as if they came out of Obama's mouth. That the same people are so whipped up in a partisan frenzy to take up the practice of guilt by association themselves to smear a respected member of the online community is the height of hypocrisy and damn stupid.
I am proud to call Digby not only a colleague but a friend. For some reason she has become a lightning rod among those who want to see conspiracies against their candidate absolutely everywhere. This is ridiculous, and deeply damaging to the progressive movement as a whole. There have been few bloggers anywhere who have been as scrupulously evenhanded in this primary as she has, to the point that she's been attacked for being shills of multiple candidates this year.
Somewhere along the line many activists and netroots Democrats have taken on the paranoid style in American politics and it simply has to stop. The negative consequences are very great and the tactics are exactly what we need to get away from.
You have the right to criticize WVWV for their choices all you like. But lay off my pal Digby. She does not deserve this.