Maryscott O'Connor

MyLeftwing is published by the fearless Maryscott O'Connor, one of the few diarists from DailyKos to successfully go solo.

MLW is a site with a no holds barred attitude against Republicans but their ire is unabashedly unleashed against the conservative and even moderates of the Democratic party.

MLW is like a punk band, fast, furious and very metal. Maryscott is like a cross between Exene Cervenka (when she's in a good mood) and Sid Vicious (when she's really pissed off).

I am HUGE fan of this site and their publisher. They are truly the soul of the left in the netroots.

Once again, I find myself marveling at the ability of the right to repeat the same talking points in every media channel known to man. What we're presently seeing is a repeat of the practice of swiftboating, which I'd define as the rendering unacceptable of any serious challenge to rightist power by a concerted mud-slinging campaign. It's been done before, for example, to Michael Moore, derided as a 'radical' for accurately pointing out the Bush administration's failures in confronting terrorism, and that the Iraq war was based on lies; to Richard Clarke, a dedicated civil servant and counter-terrorism expert in four administrations, who morphed into a greedy hack interested only in notoriety and book sales; to Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury Secretary, over his exposé of the inner workings of the Bush administration; and most consequentially, to John Kerry, who was turned in a matter of weeks from a war hero into a craven traitor. There are more examples, of course, including attempts that failed, such as the one on Eliot Spitzer.

Today, a similar effort is directed at the most powerful and consequential challenge to the right to emerge in decades: the Progressive blogosphere.

This is the post formerly known as : Jerome, honey, do you really want to be called "Baby Turdblossom"? Instead become the next Chuck DeFeo. It was edited for the sake of brevity.

[via American Prospect Online - Hard Sell]:

“Absent Gore, the person people favor is Feingold,” explained Kenneth Bernstein, a.k.a. TeacherKen, a white-bearded social studies instructor at the Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Md., who also advises congressional candidates on education policy and spoke at the conference. On Sunday morning, Bernstein gathered for a final coffee with MyLeftWing’s Maryscott O’Connor and NYU cultural anthropology professor Jeffrey Feldman, who writes a column he calls Frameshop. The consensus at the table was that Warner had come off all wrong, from his extravagant party to his slick campaign video to his speech, which focused too much on autobiography and not enough on acknowledging the importance of the netroots -- a mistake Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid did not make in his Saturday night address, which heaped praise on the bloggers and their new medium.

[...]

all the griping was clearly having an impact on Warner's internet strategist Jerome Armstrong by Sunday morning, who dismissed the snipers as "ideological" and "pretty left wing."

"It wasn't going to be a love-in to begin with,"Armstrong sighed as the final brunch session of the conference wound down. "This was a great opportunity for bloggers to meet Warner. But also, the whole blogosphere and broader press was focused on this event. Coming here was a no-brainer."

I find it very interesting that you co-authored a book that focuses in part on the scourge of politicals consultants while becoming a political consultant (actually, Online Strategy Director, correct?) for presidential hopeful, Mark Warner. I honestly cannot wrap my head around that one yet.

What I find more fascinating is the way you and your crew at MyDD.com have been streering the blog towards proving : (1) You represent a monolithic constituency called "the Netroots(tm)"; (2) Because you represent this constituency, said Netroots is neither ideological nor left-wing.

Which is why when I coincidentally read the following Karl Rove quote after reading your abovementioned, I just felt sick to my stomach.

Rage, anger, vitriol have been the words this weekend, their harsh buzz emanating from the electronic nests of wasps. Anger is the no-no, apparently. We on the left, who pride ourselves on our reasonableness, our ability to see all sides, to listen respectfully, to offer gentle critiques, we are not supposed to get angry. That is for the other side. We are to suffer their slings and arrows nobly.

I have written previously about

MaryScott O'Connor had a relatively good profile done about her at The Left, Online and Outraged. I say relatively because, for such a beautiful woman, the picture they chose to run makes her look totally hideous.

We met online through DailyKos and face to face during last years's Washington DC United for Peace and Justice march. We spent some quality time while marching and bunking in her hotel room (she has a cute little snore I've blogged about somewhere at DailyKos).

Maryscott, like many of us in the left blogosphere, does this not out of looking for a job as a political consultant or becausse she want to get rich and famous doing punditry online. As I have said before, to fastest way to get rich and famous online is to do pornography.

No, she and I an many others do this because we are optimists. People sometimes don't get that under Maryscott's rants, Rude Pundit's profanities, Jesus General's sarcasm and this here blogger's blunt political pronouncements against people both on the left and right, lie the likes of dreamers who wake up in the morning eager to find something that will give us another reason and another day to believe in the goodness of Humanity. I think this is what is lost in the Washington Post article.

Still, I am glad my blog sister is there. She deserves it. Nobody does outrage and gets results like Maryscott O'Connor.

SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. -- In the angry life of Maryscott O'Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O'Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O'Connor's reputation is as one of the angriest of all. "One long, sustained scream" is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day.

She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers "malevolent," a "sociopath" and "the Antichrist"? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as "Satan," or about Karl Rove, "the devil"? Should it be about the "evil" Republican Party, or the "weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving" Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says "I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned"?

Darfur, she finally decides.