Yearly Kos Notes

The press is trying to figure out how to cover an event as optimistic, energetic, and dynamic as Yearly Kos.  Today’s coverage will be dwarfed by the 250 media messengers expected to attend tomorrow’s Presidential Candidate Forum and related events.  Here are a few bites of what the media’s been saying:

WaPo: “An estimated 1,800 conventioneers — progressive bloggers who write about pols, pols who want bloggers to write about them, the media who’s writing about the bloggers and the pols — descend on Chicago to mingle, discuss the future and, for now, pat each other on the back.”

New Yorker: “I admit that I was expecting this crowd to look weirder. Not hippie weirder, though I did expect a bit of that, but nerdy weirder. So I was surprised at how extraordinarily normal everyone looked.”
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“No one naked around here. No chaos at YearlyKos. No “sweet smell of marijuana,” as the straight papers used to refer to it. No demands for revolution. No denunciations of bourgeois democracy.”

You can compare those bites to these savvier, snarkier takes:

Gawker: “The tinfoil-hat crazies who think that George W. Bush planned 9/11 as a way to enact his monomaniacal plans to appoint himself Emperor For Life of a religious theocracy in which women’s uteri are property of the state are gathering in Chicago for the Yearly Kos convention, where they will smoke dope, burn bras, wear beards, and compare the president to Hitler.”

Unconfirmed Sources: “Unconfirmed sources report that Markos Moulitas, founder of the political blog Daily Kos, has been taken into custody by federal law enforcement officers. Moulitas was apprehended leaving a bar after meeting with other bloggers late last night. Moulitas is now in federal custody and is being held on unknown charges.”
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“The capture of Moulitas and other members of his leadership ‘cell’ is a serious blow to the Kos and will severely damage their ability to mount effective operations in the future.” Says embattled attorney general Alberto Gonzales. “The Daily Kos has been a forum and organizing point for anti-government forces for too long. We had to take it down before the damages to this country was irreversible.”

The fact is that this group is full of intelligent, literate, passionate people who are trying feverishly to right the American ship of state. We are doctors, lawyers, debate coaches, construction workers, therapists, foresters, and teachers. We are just regular folks who believe in the promise of democracy, and we’ve found that our blogs give us a megaphone in a system that prizes silence.

Tomorrow, when Senators and Representatives fill McCormick Place for their turn with the activist core of the liberal blogosphere, they’ll be met by a community of people who want nothing more than justice and honesty… and a little something to get snarky about.