I didn’t read much of the 140 comment post while I was on vacation. Someone that said this has gone from being a liberal blog to being a Democratic Party blog. That seems true. Someone else (or maybe the same person) said that it went off the rails because I got lazy. I think that might be confusing cause and effect. But either way, it is true that I got lazy.
Having founded DL and then having tricked a bunch of awesome people to go from commenters to contributors, I suppose I am viewed as a father of this thing, and as I father I guess I have responsibilities. I don’t agree that the family paradigm really fits because, as El Som points out, we’ve always been a loose, consensus-seeking confederation, and not a patriarchy. But maybe the family metaphor fits better than I realize.
When any family experiences a significant trauma, the loss of the child for, example, it changes. It would not be surprising for such a family to slide into dysfunction. I happen to regard the recent election as a significant trauma. It has changed us as people, and so it is not surprising that it has changed this family.
And so, as to El Som’s remarks…
I agree with them. We are standing on scorched earth. I was sad to hear he was leaving, but not surprised. The stridency of the contributors and commenters here is off-putting. Particularly the stridency of people who have been proven so wrong by events. But now I’m blogging about blogging and that’s something I try to avoid.
1) Because it is boring, and there is no higher crime than being boring. and 2) Because it doesn’t move me in the direction of accomplishing my goal of being an irascible peanut gallery to the politics and political players in Delaware.
In other words, what I think our job here amounts to is trying to be a pain in the ass to some people whose asses seem much too unaccustomed to pain. And (keeping in mind point #1), trying to do so while being funny. And if not funny, at least readable. We’ve had our successes doing that, and I believe El Som is going to keep on doing that because he is so good at it. I understand his desire to not do that here.
This is a picture of me and some friends from Christmas 1985.