This is not 1968

This is 1968


This is !968



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This is NOT 1968-Yearly Kos


Having spent the last weekend watching soccer, Yearly Kos was not really on my radar screen, or for most of the site's readers. I didn't watch the C-Span forums, or read many accounts.

Why?

If I was English, you wouldn't ask me that, would you?

No.

But over the week, I've noticed a theme occurring from the news stories coming from Yearly Kos: idealistic leftists gather. Kos attacked mercenaries, which makes him a commie. These people were treated too well by politicians and will lose their outsider status.

First, Bryon York and Mickey Kaus are free to match service records with Kos any time.

Second, leftists don't go to Las Vegas to talk politics and gamble. They go to the Bay Area or the New School. They don't discuss how to get people they disagree with elected.

But the media has acceptable frames. Religious fundamentalists are badly dress scolds. People on the left are all looking to recreate 1968.

I don't know about anyone else. but the people I knew who were college-aged adults in 1968, were not hippies, were not protesting the cops. They were trying to not get killed in Vietnam by sapper teams and NVA snipers. I grew up around Vietnam Vets, not hippies. So when people talk about 1968, the part about Tet, I get. The hippie part, pure history.

But the media cannot understand that the left has moved on. We're not into "revolution" and "hating America", but meaningful reform and a sane foriegn policy. I don't even think that was true in 1968.

But they look at Kos and when they see him, they are shocked that he's not mouthing the platitudes of the 1960's or that bloggers are not college kids, but adults with lives, jobs and families. They want to make the story fit their frames, while missing the story before them.

Take Ned Lamont. He's a WASP, middle-aged rich guy. Paul Hackett was a Marine reservist just back from Iraq. These are hardly hippies, waiting to return to 1968. This isn't about fighting old battles, but correcting years of a pro-corporate, big oil policy which is no longer sustainable. It is about bringing accountability and participation back to politics.

When Michelle Malkin has to edit video to make it seem like Hillary Clinton was booed for saying support the troops, she's back in that frame of 1968, even though it makes no sense. Because college is so expensive, 90 percent of enlistees do so for college money. Any crowd of activists will have veterans in them, it's just percentages. She needs to create a fiction that doesn't exist.

Another Congressman calles Jack Murtha weak

video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6nR7mgjfmE

Rep. Gohmert: Let me close by saying some have not had nice things to say about our colleague Mr. Murtha, and others wanting to pull out of Iraq quickly. I understand the faithful visitation that he does routinely. So i say thank god for his big heart. I say thank god for his compassion. Thank god for his visits to the wounded. Thank god for his ministering to grieving families. But thank god he was not here and prevailed after the bloodbaths at Normandy and in the Pacific or we would be here speaking Japanese or German. Thank you.

Rep. Murtha: Was the gentleman at any of those locations? Either at normandy or any of those locations?

Rep. Gohmert: You want to know which locations?

Rep. Murtha: Yeah. Normandy?

Rep. Murtha: I say were you there?

Rep. Gohmert: No, sir. I wasn't.

Rep. Murtha: Were you in Vietnam?

Rep. Gohmert: No, sir.

Rep. Murtha: Iraq?

Rep. Gohmert: No. I have been over there. I haven't been fighting.

Rep. Murtha: Boots on the ground?

Rep. Gohmert: I do admire the gentleman's compassion and all he has done for our wounded. He has done a great service that would be you, Mr. Murtha.

Shit, Murtha left college to spend a year on the MLR in Korea killing Chinese. He knows about killing. Gohmert had to shut his fucking gob when he realized he was lecturing a combat veteran on war.

Stephanie Tubb-Jones told a story about one of her constituents with serious brain trauma. When Bush came to give her son the Purple Heart, she told him how she felt. Bush said nothing. When she talked about Murtha, she said he had seen her son three times and "treated him like his own son".

Murtha is embraced by people for his compassion and common sense and not his moderate voting record. We're looking less and less at records and more on how they would change the country. Jim Webb was actively supported on Daily Kos, despite his former service in the Reagan Administration.

When the media looks for Abby Hoffman at Yearly Kos, they're looking for the wrong thing, in the wrong way.

We know the past was filled with mistakes and no one wants to repeat them. They just want a sane, working government.

The story they should be telling is about the rise of an activist middle class, one which can finance both candidates and bloggers, which is leaderless but community-based. Not looking for the ghosts of the past.