All the Democratic candidates for president except Joe Biden made the pilgrimmage last weekend to the YearlyKos conference in order to have their progressive bona fides reauthorized. Senator Durbin, who is not running for president, couldn't make it so he sent instead an obsequious video message (which has since been pulled from YouTube) praising the people who write for the DailyKos and their "progressive" influence on the Democratic party.
So what's the problem? The DailyKos is the biggest blog in the country, several dozen people write for it, and politicians need to score points with their audience. Why not attend?
Suppose, however, Republican candidates went to a conference sponsored by a right-wing blogger whose writers, readership, commenters included a large number of racial bigots. How would the media respond to the willingness of the Republicans to associate themselves with such people? I expect that the folks over at MSNBC and elsewhere in liberaldom would go nuts, as they should.
But then why are these folks silent about the Democrats going to the YearlyKos conference? The staff and reasership at The DailyKos aren't racial bigots but an uncomfortably high percentage of them appear to be anti-semitic bigots. This piece from the Washington Times fills in the details.
So the question this raises is why do Clinton, Obama, and Edwards fawn over these people? Why do the media let them get away with it? Is "Progressive" being turned into a synonym for "anti-semitic"?
RLC