Why We're Not in Chicago This Week

DAILY KOS CREATOR MARKOS MOULITSAS

I seem to be one of the few bloggers who is not in Chicago for a love-in known as Yearly Kos.

If you’ve been living in a cave and just discovered the blogosphere, Yearly Kos is the annual convention of all things political grassroots blogging as long as it is liberal political grassroots blogging.

Yearly Kos has become so big time in only two years that it has grown from merely being a hangout for disciples of Daily Kos, the mega-liberal political blog, to a must-visit for Democratic presidential wannabes and punching bag for Faux News’s Bill O’Reilly and other right-wing demagogues.

I stopped reading Daily Kos quite a while ago and have somehow managed to avoid linking to it in any of the nearly 3,000 posts that I have put up in the shortish history of Kiko’s House.

Howcum?

As the WaPo’s E.J. Dionne points out in a timely column, Daily Kos is not liberal, it's partisan. And in my view (although not necessarily E.J.'s) that means endlessly, predictably and boringly all things Democratic with only a few cuss words and grammatical errors to spice things up.

Markos Moulitsas started Daily Kos in 2002 in reaction to the horrors being visited upon America by President Bush and has ridden this trail of tears to blogging superstardom. Along the way he has incurred the same kind of wrath from the O'Reillys and Limbaughs once reserved for another president who did interesting things with cigars.

Markos is to be congratulated for his success, but my time can be better spent doing something other than indulging in an orgy of liberal self-congratulation. After all, Bush hasn't been impeached and it's a lead-pipe cinch that he'll dump the Iraq mess on his successor, probably one of the candidates sucking up to bloggers at Yearly Kos.

But my biggest issue is that an inevitable result of the success of Daily Kos is that it has morphed from being part of the solution to being part of the problem – the problem being a feckless cheerleader for a majority party whose primary attribute is . . . fecklessness.

I myself am going to bake cookies.

Photograph by Frederic Larson/San Francisco Chronicle