This is a heavily edited expansion of a long comment I made, but I think it deserves its own diary.
I just want to say something about the tone of Daily Kos. First, let me say that I'm not going anywhere, and I'm not going to beat my breast and rend my garments over our shortcomings as a community. Regrettably, there's nothing new about progressives bashing each other. It's an old problem. Older than Daily Kos. It can be over the relative priority we assign to our agenda, or it can be petty personality squabbles, or it can be substantive issues that descend into incivility. But we do have some particular history of our own.
Kossacks, to put it bluntly, are people who have had the crap kicked out of us for years. Our kind has been cruelly derided by the right wing since Reagan rode into Washington... and we've been targets of scorn and ridicule in the most slanderous ways. We've been marginalized by the media - those who aren't out and out right-wing hate-mongers themselves, people polluting the radio waves, everywhere in America, Every Single Day.
And we've been repeatedly disappointed by, if not outrightly betrayed by our representatives in Congress. We helped elect folks who then censured MoveOn.org.
It's not surprising that we're cranky.
More, of course, under the fold.
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