How do we determine a truest?
Each week we offer "truest statement of the week." Some think we play favorites. That's not the case.
Dalia Hashad was really the inspiration for the feature because she would just lay it out there on any number of topics when she was a co-host of Law and Disorder. And we might not be covering an issue that week so we couldn't include her in an article. Dona's always urged short features to break up the visual spacing of the site and we came up with "truest" as a result.
Most readers of this site are familiar with David Sirota's bullying e-mails to C.I. (Click here for one example, if you're late to the party.) Despite those e-mails, C.I. has nominated Sirota for a truest -- the rest of us shot it down both times. The truest has to stand as a truest and, if it does, it ends up with the honor -- many times there are two truests each week.
Dalia probably has the most -- or close to the most -- "truests" of anyone and she's probably closely followed by Cindy Sheehan who will overtake her this year if the pattern holds. We've gone with politicians and MSM journalists when they've earned it. There's no set rule other than what you state has to be true, strongly true.
Visiting Corrente this weekend, we saw this post by Lambert. He recommends two posts by two women. And as we read along with one of the posts, by Riverdaughter of The Confluence, we think, "Oh good, we can give it to Riverdaughter this week." We are not close to her, we are not one with her but we're happy to give out an accolade to anyone in the PUMA-sphere even Riverdaughter.
But then we read her next paragraph. Where she refers to "the delusional left, like Chris Hedges and Will Bunch . . ."
Oh, so sorry. We didn't realize that Riverdaughter was the arbitrar of political good taste. Probably because we well remember 2008 and what rumors Riverdaughter ran with. And now she wants to slam Chris Hedges?
Chris Hedges who worked overtime to alert people to the reality of Barack Obama? Chris Hedges who was trashed repeatedly in 2008 by Ton Hayden and others?
If we disagree with Chris Hedges today, we don't say a damn word. Now if he came out for war (which would require him pulling a Chris Hitchens), okay. But otherwise? Chris Hedges has a pass from us. When he stood brave in 2008, C.I. called a phone conference and said she'd heard that not only was Hedges standing brave, he was about to endorse Ralph Nader. At which point, we all knew that meant he would get even more villified. We made the choice at that time (and, yes, he did endorse Nader) that we would not engage in any public stoning of Chris Hedges, any calling him crazy or delusional or anything else.
Because he stood brave when others caved. When people who endorsed Barack publicly would tell us privately that they thought he was a failure but that they had to because there was so much pressure on this (especially true of C.I.'s friends in the entertainment world who were getting attacked by George Clooney and Susan Sarandon -- which is why we're all so thrilled Tim Robbins bailed on Sue), Chris Hedges stood strong.
We remember what 2008 was like. We remember being popular with lefties, independents and Democrats and suddenly losing huge portions of all three. We remember the strong arm tactics, the offers of "recant and we'll link" -- we remember it all. We are fortunate that we already had a community built up before 2008 so we lost some people but not enough to really suffer. But we also don't try to make a living at our writing. Chris Hedges does. At his writing and at his speaking. And yet he told the truth when you can be sure he had plenty of offers to hop on board the Bambi Bus and ride the gravy train to Corporate Moneyville.
So when Riverdaughter wants to insult Chris Hedges as part of the "delusional left"? She's yet again showing her immaturity and ignorance. And, in the end, that is why we had to break with her and insist that she delink from our site. She's not very educated, she's woefully uninformed and yet she writes and writes and writes.
Her positions are often good ones, it's just she lacks the maturity and the knowledge to back them up.
Today she trashes Chris Hedges as part of the "delusional left" and yet he never drank the Kool-Aid. And yet, he's a Socialist not a Democrat -- a fact that -- like so many others -- Riverdaughter seems unfamiliar with.
As stupid as she is in that post -- and she's pretty damn stupid in that post -- we'd still be willing to highlight her as a "truest" one week. But that will never happen while she's attacking the people she should be making peace with. And it will never happen while she praises a man (Jim Webb) who's shared -- in writing, check out those novels -- violent and racist attacks on women. Again, it is her lack of knowledge that forever weakens any argument she might make. As she flirts these days with endorsing the sexist Jim Webb ("women can't fight"), Riverdaughter mainly reminds people that before she came around to supporting Hillary Clinton's primary campaign, she was supporting John Edwards.
