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Do the right thing

By Robert Goldberg
August 1, 2007

This weekend, all of the Democratic candidates for president (with the sane exception of Joe Biden) will trek to Chicago to speak at the YearlyKos convention, the gathering of those who populate the powerful Democratic blog, the DailyKos.

Defenders of the DailyKos, like Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson, claim "blogs are the 21st century version of the public square." But the DailyKos is not just a blog. It is a political force. It is not, for instance FreeRepublic.com that has its share of racists, cranks and nut jobs. And it is not a talk-show host or celebrity who makes an intemperate remark like Don Imus. The DailyKos is organized to mobilize Democrats around specific policies and force politicians to support those policies. The blog — consisting of the Kos-selected and -monitored diarists and its minions is managed carefully to achieve maximum political power. The DailyKos is closer to Tammany Hall than MySpace.

But instead of handing out turkeys at Thanksgiving for votes the dozens of commentators on the DailyKos are driven by ideological passion and then some. And anti-Semitism is a significant source of that zeal.

Don't take my word for it. Ask Eyal Rosenberg who resigned as a diarist for the DailyKos on May 9 after in his words "all the Israel Hate spewing out of one too many diaries around here." As he wrote in his last post: "with this last post: Reading these past months on dkos has led me to believe that people here, under the 'progressive' banner, support views that end up in one place: Me dead."

Mr. Rosenberg is not the only one they want to kill. Recently, a DailyKos diarist suggested "gassing Joe Lieberman like a dog." This exchange followed:

"I know you didn't mean it that way, but a reference to gassing a Jew needs to be hidden.

"I hope you will join me in asking that this comment be hidden and that there will not be a pile on. I will find some other comments of yours and uprate to make up for this."

Jew gassing is something to be hidden or uprated (whatever that means) but nothing to be ashamed of at the DailyKos.

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