Infiltrating Yearly Kos: Now with photos!

Expecting a catharsis of nutroots fury, our man on in the inside faces the terrible truth about YK: it’s crushingly boring.

But he did catch Wes Clark enjoying the Colonel’s secret recipe. Read on.

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Panels

I was looking for a different panel but wandered into a gathering of “Science Bloggers” who were discussing Intelligent Design. One earnest redhead was lamenting how, in the ’90s, “[a] lot of times we would see that these conservative Christians, at this point, they were just showing up wanting their values affirmed.”

At which point someone next to her asked just what sort of an affirmation of the values should take, since it had to be “in words of no more than one syllable”?

And the first woman took her to task for that, complaining that that was just the kind of hubris that had radicalized the right.

At this point the science bloggers went back to discussing how to argue with ID people (“I’ve never convinced anyone that God doesn’t exist or that Jesus isn’t their personal savior, but it’s much easier to convince them to vote Democratic…”) and how to split atoms… with their minds, so I fled next door. (Note: Gag unabashedly stolen from Ace of Spades.)

Next door was the “FDL” meeting, which played out like some sort of self-help group. FDL stands for FireDogLake, Jane Hamsher’s lefty blog. These people seemed to be going around, reading out the results of a questionnaire about another blogger in the room (“what is your background music?”) and then, to hearty applause, revealing that person’s screen name and real name.

Obviously I believe people should be able to blog anonymously and I didn’t record any of their names. But here’s the strange thing: I know a few anonymous bloggers on the right-hand side of ‘sphere, and have for a long time, and they don’t even tell me their real names, much less reveal them in an open meeting. Meanwhile the paranoid oh-no-the-NSA-is-tapping-my-phone Bushitler left had this big debutante party.

I may have completely misread what was going on with the FDL unmasking, but it was sufficiently boring and weird that I didn’t feel like sticking around to clear it up.

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Caption Contest

So I went in to the big hall for the keynote speeches and hors d’oeuvres. I immediately noticed their décor…oh, whoops, sorry, too many French words per sentence. They had these big images projected on the wall to remind us what country we were in, and set a nice patriotic theme. Here’s the Flag:

And Here’s … oh, hello, General Clark. Chicken?

Here’s the Statue of Liberty:

Right. And here’s a…

SWEET SASSY MOLASSEY! What in the name of Sauron’s eye is this?

It’s like Tim Burton’s Night Before Independence Day. You guys help me out here.

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Previously: Infiltrating Yearly Kos: “No, no, no, don’t call them a Nazi”; Infiltrating Yearly Kos: Post 1

Update: Byron York wonders how one can be simultaneously a political kingmaker and a disenfranchised upstart.

Discussing a new project to make their opinions better known to lawmakers in Washington, several people expressed slightly different versions of the same fear: People see that we are bloggers, the fear goes, and that we’re on the left, and they think we’re nuts. “How do you avoid being seen as just a bunch of crazy bloggers?” asked one person. “Has the work ameliorated the stigma of the crazy leftist blogger?” asked another. And earlier Thursday, at a workshop run by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, one leader urged the Kossacks not to let people “marginalize you as a blogger—they may think that you are nutty and kind of wild.”

That is the contrast of YearlyKos. On the one hand, Moulitsas speaks as if he has won the political game, while on the other side some of his followers worry that they’re not even in it.

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