It used to be that Daily Kos was a haven for people like myself who were fed up with the war in Iraq. Howard Dean successfully tapped into the sentiment, and Daily Kos seemed like the perfect continuation. Wars were considered to be something to be relegated to the dustbin of history, something to be fought only in self-defense.
Riding the wave of this antiwar momentum, Daily Kos and other sites like it helped contribute to the victory of Barack Obama in 2008. Under him, we were going to have a new era. Nuclear weapons were to be abolished. While he was not a pacifist, he was not going to take us into “dumb wars” anymore. His call for hope and change was so strong, he won a Nobel Peace Prize right off the bat.
But then something funny started to happen. First of all, he escalated the war in Afghanistan, a move which turned that conflict into our longest war in history. That was a topic of epic debate at Daily Kos. Some people charged that Kos and Barack Obama had totally sold out, while some were saying that we had to get behind the President. The unwritten fear was that if the war got too much out of hand, it would spread to Pakistan and we would have a nuclear armed Taliban on our hands.
Then came Libya, in which the US turned one of Africa’s biggest economies into a failed state and one of the world’s biggest open air slave markets. Gaddafi was a bad person, but this was a case of the ends failing to justify the means.
Barack Obama’s coalition held together in 2012, in part because Mitt Romney was spoiling for a fight with Russia, and the Democrats were able to portray him as an unhinged warmonger. But Obama continued to start the very sort of dumb wars that he once said he was against. He armed Syrian rebels in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Assad. He even sent US troops there, which could have triggered a conflict with Russia. He aided and abetted a coup against Ukraine’s government, which led to the mess that country is in today. He aided and abetted Saudi Arabia’s war of choice against Yemen. Instead of two wars, he got us into nine by the time he left office. So much for hope and change.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton turned out to be even more of a warmonger than George Bush was. She planned to create a no-fly zone in Syria, which could have started World War III. That was one of the most common reasons we heard from people why they were not voting for her. She was one of the chief architects of the war in Libya; her remark, “We came, we saw, he died,” was one of the most chilling and disturbing remarks made, more so than most of Donald Trump’s mean tweets. The only exceptions we can thing of would be his threats to nuke Iran and North Korea. While she did nothing illegal regarding Benghazi, it was inexplicable and inexcusable; there is no excuse ever to be taken by surprise.
Meanwhile, Daily Kos changed right with the Democratic Party. Now, they are no longer an independent voice for the left seeking to hold both parties accountable, which is necessary in a healthy democracy. Instead, they are now little more than a Neocon war site. In their view, it’s OK to start wars as long as a Democrat starts them. It is when the other party is in power when they suddenly break out the Peace and Love slogans from the 1960’s.
They do little more now than threat the war in Ukraine as a game. They cheer on every blow from their “team” as though it were a sports contest rather than a matter of life and death that could spiral out of control at any time.
People who disagree with them are branded as Russians, Russian assets, traitors, monkeys, primates, yellow, surrender monkeys who make one’s skin crawl, and other such epithets. This is the exact same behavior that we saw from Red State (the GOP equivalent of Kos) during the Iraq War, when George Bush was in power.
Case in point. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right voice in Congress, recently tweeted, “The American people do not want war with Russia, but NATO & our own foolish leaders are dragging us into one.
A war that no one will win.
Escalation over Ukraine, a non-member nation, risking nuclear war is a power play endangering the entire world.
We should pull out of NATO.”
We disagree about the pulling out of NATO part, but agree with everything else she said. When you find yourself to the right of people like Rep. Greene, you need to think long and hard about your positions. The Neocons at Daily Kos have clearly positioned themselves to the right of her and now regard her as a traitor and a Russian asset.
Even if there wasn’t a danger of nuclear war, there is still the matter of gas prices and food prices being too high, stock prices off to one of their worst starts ever, and rampant inflation. This is being fueled, in part, by the government printing more and more money and feeding the beast that is the Military Industrial Complex.
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