All is Not Well Among the Democrats

I was over at The Daily Kos when I caught this diary entry written by one of the many Daily Kos bloggers. Basically it's an announcement that this person was leaving Daily Kos because, in this person's words, "I realized then that this site could become a vicious gang, a roiling snake ball, without a leader and with almost no prompting. It could become a beast that would fight to eat its out tale. And I believe it did."

The person then ended the post by posting an excerpt from one of only two posts that Barack Obama has ever made to the Daily Kos, the last one being in 2005. Senator Obama made the point that we shouldn't insist on ideological purity within the Democratic Party, which is a good idea. That's because I've seen the Republican Party adhere to an ideological purity (despite it's public message that it's a "big tent" party that's wide enough to accommodate all kinds of viewpoints) based on appeasing far right-wing evangelical Christian groups that had alienated more moderate Republicans. Here is what Barack Obama wrote back in 2005:

The same principle holds with respect to issues other than judicial nominations. My colleague from Illinois, Dick Durbin, spoke out forcefully - and voted against - the Iraqi invasion. He isn't somehow transformed into a "war supporter" - as I've heard some anti-war activists suggest - just because he hasn't called for an immediate withdrawal of American troops. He may be simply trying to figure out, as I am, how to ensure that U.S. troop withdrawals occur in such a way that we avoid all-out Iraqi civil war, chaos in the Middle East, and much more costly and deadly interventions down the road. A pro-choice Democrat doesn't become anti-choice because he or she isn't absolutely convinced that a twelve-year-old girl should be able to get an operation without a parent being notified. A pro-civil rights Democrat doesn't become complicit in an anti-civil rights agenda because he or she questions the efficacy of certain affirmative action programs. And a pro-union Democrat doesn't become anti-union if he or she makes a determination that on balance, CAFTA will help American workers more than it will harm them.

Or to make the point differently: How can we ask Republican senators to resist pressure from their right wing and vote against flawed appointees like John Bolton, if we engage in similar rhetoric against Democrats who dissent from our own party line? How can we expect Republican moderates who are concerned about the nation's fiscal meltdown to ignore Grover Norquist's threats if we make similar threats to those who buck our party orthodoxy?

The some of the comments following this person's farewell blog entry are pretty vicious and, yes, one could say that he/she only wrote it out of a sense of exclaiming "LOOK AT ME, I'M AN ATTENTION WHORE!!!" But suppose this person didn't write this farewell entry because he/she is an "attention whore" but, instead, did it as a warning against the Democrats falling down the same ideological purity path that has done in the Republican Party. It's obvious that this person became so alienated by being on The Daily Kos that he/she has decided to write a resignation blog entry as a statement against what he/she has seen and doesn't like.