zenpundit.com

There appears to be an emerging civil war in the Democratic Party flowing along generational, ideological, gender and racial lines that has just spilled onto one of the premier sites of the Left blogosphere, the DailyKOS:

On Friday, it got to be too much for Alegre, a diarist on the flagship liberal blog DailyKos, who frequently writes in support of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I’ve put up with the abuse and anger because I’ve always believed in what our online community has tried to accomplish in this world,” Alegre wrote Friday evening. “No more.”

Objecting to the tone of attacks against Mrs. Clinton and her supporters on the blog, the diarist called for a “writers strike.”

“This is a strike – a walkout over unfair writing conditions at DailyKos. It does not mean that if conditions get better I won’t ‘work” at DailyKos again,” Alegre wrote, promising to come back only “if we ever get to the point where we’re engaging each other in discussion rather than facing off in shouting matches.”

The blogosphere has never been known for its polite, gentle discourse, and while fiercely partisan, being a Democrat does not make one immune from attacks from the lefty blogs (see Lieberman, Joseph I.). But now, the major internal divisions within the Democratic Party seem to be splitting liberal bloggers. So what happens when the unity enforcement mechanism becomes disjointed?

….One user, Sentient, called for a “permanent succession”:

“Why should this site and Kos profit from the traffic we add to DailyKos, and the sense by outsiders that it represents the netroots as a whole?” the blogger asked, adding later, “But I just don’t see how people come back together on a daily basis after a falling out like this.”

If you heavily promote a kind of political discourse based upon demonizing opponents and venting bile it soon becomes a habitual frame of mind. All disagreement becomes intolerable and ad hominem invective rules. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of zealots.

In politics, ambiguity, restraint and a lack of passionately held policy positions can be an advantage as the public wishfully projects their hopes and assumptions on to the candidate. Or it can simply mask the fact that the candidate has no well-thought out philosophy or basic command of the subject in question. This is great if it means the candidate is open to accepting well-considered “new thinking” but bad if the candidate simply picks up positions ad-hoc without really contemplating the downstream implications.

Senator Barack Obama’s recent sojurns in to trade policy on the campaign trail, which seem to be raw political appeals to rentier interests of the moment, are alarming economists generally associated with the Democratic Party ( Senator John McCain, the inevitable GOP nominee, isn’t any better informed on basic economics theory than is Obama – making 2008 a worrisome choice if the economy goes into the tank).

Let’s assume that Senator Barack Obama wins a narrow but clear majority of Democratic primary votes and delegates but Senator Hillary Clinton nevertheless captures the nomination by prying away just enough insider superdelegates through a series of shady, oleaginous, backroom deals.

Do African-Americans and twentysomething white liberals rebel? Do Democrats close ranks through gritted teeth ? Does Obama accept the Veep slot? Do Democratic-leaning independents go for McCain? What ?

OBAMA’S LACK OF SEA-LEGS IN FOREIGN POLICY

Or the politics of foreign policy. Senator Barack Obama is being blistered by his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination:

” Barack Obama’s offer to meet without precondition with leaders of renegade nations such as Cuba, North Korea and Iran touched off a war of words, with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton calling him naive and Obama linking her to President Bush’s diplomacy.

“I thought that was irresponsible and frankly naive,” Clinton was quoted in an interview with the Quad-City Times that was posted on the Iowa newspaper’s Web site on Tuesday.”

As a tactical diplomatic move, a change of administrations is a good time to quietly investigate de-escalating conflicts with adversaries or improving frigid relations with important partners or allies. In principle, it makes more sense than a blanket refusal to ever negotiate. An early, high profile volte-face in relations with previously hostile countries, provided there are substantive achievments with which to point as well, can be a very important signal to the rest of the world for a new president.

On the other hand, giving out something as valuable as presidential face-time, across the board to some of the world’s worst state actors, in exchange for nothing, is stupid. It diminishes the value of a presidential summit, undercuts our diplomats and demoralizes our friends while giving our enemies all the wrong incentives. If I were to guess, I’d say this empty, photo-op, gesture was the brainchild of Tony Lake, a fountainhead of bad national security analysis for four decades and currently Obama’s top foreign policy guru.

I could be wrong. Lake may have had little to do with Obama’s statement but the political fallout at least would have been easy to predict if it had been widely discussed on the Obama team. My two cents is that Obama should broaden his advisory circle, or avail himself of the experience available to him as a Senator in the form of staffers, elder statesmen and thought leaders. The questions are only going to become harder and sharper from this point on.

THIS TELEVISED BEHEADING OF THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY PRESIDENT BILL RICHARDSON

Former UN Ambassador Bill Richardson just suggested to Tim Russert that all American troops should be withdrawn from Iraq in 2007 and that security for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad be placed in Iraqi hands. Right. The embassy would be overrun in about five minutes if that happened. Does the Democratic Party really ache to relive the hostage crisis of their youth ?

I realize that the worst of the delusional screamers now dominate the Democratic primary process but an experienced international diplomat like Richardson should really try to preserve his intellectual credibility. Richardson isn’t going to win the nomination but he just might be a Secretary of State or Defense, and, as such, he shouldn’t be saying really dumb things like this on television.