Netroots
What are the roots of the progressive blogosphere? The medium you’re reading now, in its early years, was of course the place for progressive writers to speak out against George W. Bush’s war against a country that had not attacked us — an invasion advised against by U.N. weapons inspectors and the vast majority of our Western allies — and yet supported by the vast majority of Republicans and also enabled by many on our side of the aisle and in the mainstream media.
The Internet’s nascent blogosphere became a haven for progressives to gather and comment and report on that travesty. Among the best of the blogs I remember reading in those days was one penned by Markos Moulitsas and his very frequent guest writer, the late Steve Gilliard— which is, of course, the website you’re on right now, Daily Kos. (I occasionally commented on Daily Kos back then, when it was running on a software platform called Movable Type. Then in late 2003, it changed to the Scoop platform, which required registration if you wanted to comment — but it also gave users the ability to post their own diaries. A few years later, I signed up for an account.)
My state is apportioned only one representative in the U.S. House, and at that time we were represented by Bernie Sanders, who served 16 years in the House. Sanders was among the 60% of the House Democratic caucus who voted against Bush’s march to war. Meanwhile, in the Senate, the majority of Democrats — 58% — went along with Republicans in giving Bush the go-ahead to invade Iraq, if he chose to, which was very clearly his intention. Only 6 Republican House members and one senator voted nay. Among those voting yea on our side of the aisle were several who would later run for president — Dick Gephardt (‘04), Joe Lieberman (‘04), John Kerry (‘04), John Edwards (‘04 and ‘08), Chris Dodd (‘08), Joe Biden (‘08), and Hillary Clinton (‘08 and ‘16). On the other side of the aisle, five who voted yea would later run for president: Duncan Hunter (‘08), Fred Thompson (‘08), John McCain (‘08), Rick Santorum (‘12 and ‘16), and Lindsey Graham (‘16).
Barack Obama, who was at that time an Illinois state senator, wisely spoke out against the Authorization for Use of Military Force. If Bernie Sanders were nominated, he would be the first presidential nominee who actually voted against the go-ahead for Bush’s war — a horrific fiasco which resulted in the deaths of over 4000 members of our military, well over 100,000 deaths among Iraqi civilians (by the most conservative estimates), a refugee crisis, abominable mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners of war that would further demolish America’s image abroad, and a de-Baathification program which was at the root of the ISIS terror regime, which spurred yet another refugee crisis. (Sanders’s warning in his Iraq Resolution floor speech about an invasion’s potential cost in human lives and other “unintended consequences”— which echoed the view of many, many others — was unfortunately all-too prescient.)
Certainly even without regard to his vote against the AUMF, supporters of Bernie Sanders have a multitude of good reasons to respect him — and of course supporters of other candidates vying for the Democratic nomination can make solid cases for their favorites. But it must be true, too, that many folks who’ve been around the progressive blogosphere since the early days of this medium would view a Sanders nomination and election — like Obama’s — as a long-delayed moral victory against George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s and Dick Cheney’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s and Condoleeza Rice’s and the New York Times’s (among many others) rush to war.
It wouldn’t bring back the dead or heal the injured victims of that war, but it would strongly signal and reaffirm that our party believes in the principle of using military might only as a last resort.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.—George Santayana