Strange bedfellows

Politics have seriously gone off the deep end in the last week or so. Obama has capitulated to the Republicans by extending the Bush-era tax cuts, but also stacking on his own for the middle class. I don’t really have an opinion on this, though I’m mildly concerned how the government is going to take in any money. But whatever!

Anyway. The backlash against the president has been, well, crazy. There were a whole lot of posts on DailyKos about how the president sold them out, how he’s a traitor and a turncoat, and that he’s all noise. One particularly hilarious post was written by someone who unsubscribed from the Organizing for America mailing list, and then proceeded to weep about it. It’s true that some senators and representatives have been rather upset about the president as well, but they’re keeping it in line a little bit better.

The thing I find funniest of all is that opposition to the tax cuts bill comes from two very different groups: the progressives, and the teabaggers. Yes, apparently the teabaggers also oppose the bill, though for different reasons. I can only imagine what’s going through the mind of the crying unsubscribe guy when he reads that article – and he will, because it’s at the top of dKos right now. Must be a strange feeling to be united in a front with your mortal enemy. But really, what does that say about the viewpoints of the two respective groups?

I’ve looked at dKos at least once a day for roughly five years or so, and it’s very interesting to me how it’s melted down since then. The actual rhetoric there is gone; anyone who dissents from the perceived majority opinion is downvoted pretty hard. Actually, there’s been an uptick in the number of flounce posts (referred to there as GBCW, goodbye cruel world) written by more moderate people who basically think that the site has really lost the plot. An article titled Is Barack Obama Stupid? made it to the Recommended list rather quickly the other day, though the author received a huge number of downvotes for the title – not the content. That doesn’t change the fact that it made it to the recommended list in the first place.

Personally, these days I find ThinkProgress and Little Green Footballs to be among the more sane sites out there. Strange times indeed.