Jeez, it's just a convention

By Libby

I'm a bit bemused by the emotional response to the Kos convention. The WaPo trumpets that it's the "Democrats' Other National Convention." Bill O'Reilly apparently thinks it's some kind of subversive plot to overthrow America and has made it a personal mission to discredit the Kossacks and thousands of others have weighed in, pro and con.

Me, I won't be going. For one thing, at my age, I don't much like big groups anymore. I prefer more intimate gatherings and for another, as GTL points out, perhaps a bit more strongly than I might, Kos doesn't really speak for me. The Kossacks and a lot of the netroots are about power and winning contests. Me, I'm not really of the netroots. I'm just an old hippie who is about ideology and effecting social change.

I don't really care which party benefits as long as the national interest is served and I have no desire to see the GOP destroyed. I just want them to reject the extremists that have taken the party over and come back their senses. I think we need more parties, not less, in order to strike a balance within some kind of pragmatic consensus on the way forward.

But what I really don't get is this meme being promoted by the media and the wingers' louder mouths that Kos is somehow going to taint the Democrats with lefty cooties. Of course, they're going to show up. These are 1,500 of the hardest working activists in the country. They would be stupid not to make their pitch for support. That's just good politics.

And maybe my memory fails, but I don't recall such wailing and gnashing of teeth among the media and the rightwingers about alienating centrists when the neo-cons held their annual hatefest and the GOP politicians showed up, not even when they gave their Young Republican of the Year award to a gay porno star. The best outrage they could muster was a weak admission that Ann Coulter's sewer mouth is making them look bad.

The truth is, for the average Jake, these things don't even register. Neither event will have any great effect on the general election. Everything doesn't have to be an outrage and while the Kos convention is surely influential, it's not earthshakingly so. Sometimes a convention, is just a convention.