Kos’s success at campaigning also needs to be questioned. It helps to have supported the winning candidate when you’re retrospectively claiming influence, but weren’t they preaching to the converted and creating a sickly sweet stench of smug self-satisfaction which was just as off-putting and actually held Obama back from a more overwhelming victory?

So again we return to the subject of presentation vs substance.

By the way Charlotte, your presence has been requested in the comments thread for today’s letter on my blog!

I can’t let go of the idea that liberalism should be represented by the liberal party.

I used to spend quite a lot of time on Kos, oh so many years ago, when I was young, and the Iraq war was raging. It was a genuine community back then. Or so I thought.

Then one day I returned to it after a long absence, and read some piece about Global Warming that happened to be on the front page at the time, and posted a mildly sceptical comment about it.

Within minutes my comment had been removed, and I was being questioned. Who was I? Was I a Bush sympathizer? My comment would be held until I had been checked out. Previous postings of mine, critical of Dick Cheney’s custom of shooting his friends in the face, were dug out from a year or more before. I was grudgingly recognised as being one of the earliest posters on Kos. Eventually my global-warming-sceptical comment was allowed, surrounded by hostile counter-comments. And I was asked to justify my unwarranted scepticism. which I proceeded to do by saying that I was just, well, y’know, …sceptical.

The experience was like being surrounded by riot police, and put up against a wall, frisked, and interrogated. It was quite shocking. I’d not realised that climate scepticism was impermissible.

I never went back. And the experience boosted my nascent climate scepticism no end. I’m completely and irrevocably sceptical now.

Great post. the Left are still in utter utter denial about the beastliness of their ideology. And they spend their time calling Libertarians “selfish”, when it is they who want to breed an entire nation to abdicate responsibility in its entirety.