DK3 is about to come to an end, and it's been a wild ride. Some of you have been here since the beginning, some not. My first awareness of Dailykos was following a link from some site that I don't remember to Hunter Goes Postal, where the estemed Hunter pointed out what an asshole Tucker Carlson was to make light of a young girl severely wounded by a faulty pool drain. I liked what I saw on the site (kicking ass and taking GOP names) and started reading more...
I got my Dkos account some time later, and made my very first post on December 1, 2006, dissing Mary Landrieu for saying "I agree with the President more often than I disagree with him" when she was running for re-election.
Which brings me to the point of my diary. No doubt other Kossacks are writing similar diaries looking back, like it was New Years and we were talking about the best movies to have come out in the last 12 months. Me, I decided to write a diary about some of the assumptions made on this site since Obama took office. Assumptions are like asses, we all have them.....
One of my first assumptions was that Obama would make a strong, early push on gay rights, or at least repeal DADT, and that buddying up to McClurkin and Warren was meaningless pandering. I turned out to be mistaken.
Many people assumed that Obama's conservative appointments and Bush holdovers was just a Team of Rivals approach. That Obama would be calling the shots, and these appointments didn't amount to pushing a more conservative agenda than he campaigned on. After keeping Gates, after keeping the States Attorney that prosecuted Don Seigleman (she still has that job, btw), after Geitner and Rahm and Delay and Gregg and Vilsack and Salazar and Immelt and many others, I think it's safe to say that those people were mistaken.
Other assumptions have been more mundane - I spend the longest time assuming that Cassiodorus was a woman and that Mehitabel9 was a man - both incorrect. For some reason, everyone and their mother assumes that the Geekesque username belongs to a woman. I remember Cenk Uygur citing one of Geek's diaries during the primary wars, saying 'who I assume is a woman'.
With politicians, it is possible to make relatively educated assumptions about what politicians believe, by following Meteor Blade's sig:
Don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you do and I'll tell you what you believe.
So it's relatively easy to assume that Obama doesn't really care about bringing serious reform to the banking industry to end Too Big To Fail, doesn't really care about passing some of the reforms he strongly backed as a candidate, like the EFCA or fixing NAFTA.
But with an online community, that's a little harder to do, since we generally have to take people's words for it when it comes to what they do. Which is why it's nice to have the Socrates Triple Filter Test when talking about others online. Is what you are about to say True - do you know it to be fact-based? The second test is Goodness - is what you are about to say good? Basically the old "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all". And the third test is Usefulness - is what you are saying something useful? Yeah, the link is a cute little story that someone made up, but it should give you pause in what you assume about the motivations of others when you don't have much information to go by.
Some people here have made certain assumptions about me. Assumptions that are rather humorous given what else happened at about the same time as my first post to this website. You see, in December 2006 I asked a beautiful woman for her phone number. A beautiful woman that I dated for some time, and ended up marrying before Obama won the election in 2008.
Here we are, our first dance as husband & wife.
Our wedding party, complete with flower girl and ring bearer. Faces blurred for privacy.
We've all made assumptions over the last two years. I hope I haven't unfairly denigrated the motivations of other Kossacks who I have disagreed with in the past. I've probably managed to do so in at least one of my 17,000 comments here, so I apologize for that.