Flashback

The FISA bill has been postponed. With the fight over this bill, and the way Obama has been defended by much of the lefty blogosphere over it, I think the things I wrote about in November 2006 are starting to happen:

The lefty blogosphere has, for its entire existence, been a coalition of partisan Democrats, independents, moderates, and even some conservatives, fed up with outrageously corrupt GOP control in Washington DC. The rise of the Democrats will likely fracture that coalition somewhat. It's my hope that sites who put fighting corruption over partisanship remain the big dogs among the online community.

On Election Day, I wound up listening to Air America radio for the first time to keep up with results and exit polling. Host Randi Rhodes mentioned that when the Democrats take over, they'll really crack down on these pharmaceutical companies who make it so easy to make meth. It was a good reminder that knowing that Bush has been a terrible President doesn't help much when it comes to knowing what to do now to start fixing up the mess. If Rhodes represents the conventional wisdom of insider Dems, we've got a lot of work to do in keeping tabs on what they do. Some segment of the lefty blogosphere will likely just turn into a mirror image of what the righty blogosphere eventually became, a sycophantic, hypocritical, corruption-excusing mess of people with an unhealthy paranoia of the "other side". But in the end, I think people who get things right and take on both sides will stay at the top of the blog world. And hopefully we'll finally have some long-overdue balance in the blogosphere, just as we start getting it in Washington DC.

It makes sense that an issue like FISA would be the beginning of this divide. It's hard for people who either work in government, or work directly with politicians in the government, to relate to people whose political foundation is rooted in the knowledge that it's dangerous to put too much faith in government, but that's the mood of this country right now.