Just another day in paradise

Greetings from Salt Lake City, where several of ski resorts (there are 6 in this area) 30 minutes from downtown have already opened up. Today it is raining in the valley and undoubtedly snowing up at the higher elevations. If only I could afford a lift pass ($25-30).

I have been having a tough time, as most non-Bush voters have, over the past week. Like many of you, I am burnt out, tired, and despondent. But reading BOPNews lately hasn't helped at all, in fact it is making my blood boil.

The whole point of the website, I thought, was to talk about the transformation in politics and news with the propigation of the internet and Webblogs. Instead, after Kerry lost, they have been reduced to an angry club of tin-hatters in denial. Rather than discuss what went wrong strategy wise like they did with Dean and Clark, the two internet Wunderkinder, BOPsters are collecting every far fetched theory out there as to how the election was stolen by Bush.

If Atrios isn't buying those theories, do you think anyone outside the ueber-liberal bloggosphere will?

BOPster Matt Stoller likes to talk about partisanship and calls me a partisansheep, a person who is too consilatory towards enemies that are fighting dirty. I am all for fighting fire with fire when appropriate but I think in the long term, we all suffer if both sides take the scorched earth approach. There are times when being equally nasty actually backfires and it is better to firmly associate conservatives with nasty tactics.

Voter suppression is a good example. Let the GOP try to scare away black people and let the Democrats point it out and ask for everyone to vote and every vote to be counted. Makes the Republicans look very bad and Democrats look very good. It only looked bad with Gore tried to pick which votes should be counted in 2000.

It is far more constructive at this point for liberals like Matt to figure out how Democrats lost, point out Bush's failures, and help craft a message and candidates that will get the Party back into power in 2006 and then fully in 2008. I would love to have a debate with him and others about which way the party should go: to the left like I suspect he will want, to the right which he thinks I/the DLC wants, or simply to repackage which is what I really want. All the rest is just a big waste of time.