I was never all that fond of the show itself, but it got serious points for style.

Before Bono lost the mullet and became an overweening egomaniac with Fly shades.

Maybe I’ve just gone through more phases of fandom (I tend to be the obsessive fan type), but I’m not quite as worried about it. Most people don’t usually become anti-fans and start ripping at their former idol. Mostly, they just drift away and stop buying the albums, but that usually takes at least a year or two. Hell, some people are apparently looking forward to the freakin’ Backstreet Boys reunion. (Or is it that other boy band that came out at the same time? I can’t tell them apart.)

No-one’s going to stop unilaterally, nobody can make anyone else stop, there are a few really operatic personalities involved that really enjoy this sort of thing (including one, ironically, who has decidedly retro views on persons of dusky hue in his own life), and besides, for the “community” it’s not about the candidates anyway. It’s about being on the side that wins for once.

It’s about getting together with likeminded friends to count coup on all those fucking Democrats who could have fixed or avoided everything bad that’s ever happened if they had just done what you wanted them to. Fuckers have blood on their hands, dammit, and if the stick you have to use to beat them with may have picked some up shaking hands with Joe Lieberman, well, you go to war with the candidate you have.

Whatevs. I’m not going to like most of what either one of them would do when they get into office. One of them is just a little more upfront about what that’s going to be.

Ha. Ya think? And aided and abetted by those in the party who want to see the Clinton faction pushed aside.

I also think you’re right that those who set it off would like it to stop, but so far I don’t see much evidence that they’re trying too hard. Which is just going to bite them in the ass in the general.

I find it really difficult to believe that all these folks have lost their hearts and their minds to starry-eyed passion all at once. The reactive ferocity from that campaign started on day one, and it was in gross disproportion to what it was responding to (which, parenthetically, wasn’t race - it was a story Novak pulled out of his ass about some mythical denunciation).

And why wouldn’t our big activist/wonk/academic bloggers go for him? He’s a centrist, he has no patience for “gadflies,” people to the left of him are mired in the sixties and should be ignored, his coalition doesn’t rely on those pesky women whose issues are standing between the party and all those yummy white men, he’s supposed to be putting the young into the voting booth, he’s got very sharp elbows, and he’s a bright young political obsessive lawyer from a really good school.

Does any of this sound at all familiar?

So now we have a nice internecine battle going on, and the usual griefers and trolls and unstables are coming out of all sides of the woodwork to pour salt on any open class, gender or race wounds they can find. Cause bullies are cause bullying, just plain bullies are just plain bullying, everyone’s righteous and everyone’s making righteous cause with people they know are scum because it might help their favorite. I imagine the folks who set it off would probably like it to stop now. Good luck with that.

It’s been a remarkably dirty job, although oddly enough it seems to have conferred a certain amount of inspiration to, you know, actual voters.

Probably just as well we don’t matter much.

new bumper sticker: it’s an obama thing, you don’t have to understand

I think there’s also an Angry Old Broad factor in play; while it’s often dismissed as an appeal to victimhood, she often surges in the polls after she gets treated like shit by the media or by Obama/Obama supporters (I’m particularly fond of the sobriquet “Joan of Arc of the dry pussy demographic,” myself). And that’s probably because such treatment pisses off Angry Old Broads (or, in fact, *creates* Angry Old Broads). And Angry Old Broads tend to express their anger quietly.