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Doth the lady, as Queen Gertrude suggested in Hamlet, protest too much? Are you kidding? Tomanic makes Lady Macbeth look like June Cleaver. She is obviously not alone in her hubristic flights of fancy. If there's a unifying sentiment to Un::Conventional it is that every essayist believes posting online diaries is gritty heroism, epic in scope. "It makes me crazy sad when my brilliant analyses don't change anything," Martha Ture writes, for example, "just like our marches, voting, organizing don't." So what's a crazy sad girl to do? "I walk in the woods and think about our history and search for answers. What would Tecumseh have done? What would Charles Hamilton Houston have done?" The answer? "I have thrown in my lot with Indians and cowboys and small towns and against bullies and transnational corporations."

In KosWorld the phrase "thrown in my lot" has apparently become as diffuse and diluted as the all-good-things encompassing "liberal." The book's editor, Hunter, describes a speech by Wesley Clark in a Vegas hotel bar during YearlyKos as "Not a rally, but a scene from an underground resistance, or a hastily arranged troop meeting in an urban battle zone." (Having spent time both at the Clark event and on the streets of Samarra and Baghdad, all I can say is…um, not quite.) "Everywhere I turn, the conference seems specifically about me," Hunter later adds. "Or rather, about 'me' in group form -- there are a thousand people here, and I cannot find anyone I do not immediately identify with."

Hence, the problem of the echo chamber encapsulated. DailyKos diarists have every reason to be proud of a website that has grown large enough to hold a real world conference every major national Democratic politician feels obliged to attend. Yet if they were one-tenth as revolutionary or paradigm-challenging as they puff themselves up to be, this would not be so. As I wrote from the convention last year, DailyKossers revel in their status as the marginalized mainstream.

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