A clean bill till March 31, 2008 is the plan.

Not only is it bad politics coming from the playbood of bad politicians, it's wrong and morally indefensible.

Did you read David Sirota's paeon to Richard Viguerie a couple of months ago on dKos (before you left, I think)?  He was celebrating not Viguerie's expertise at direct mail, nor his ability to motivate people.  What he really respects is Viguerie's sense of movement purity that is currently helping to tear apart the Republican Party.  He argues for a like minded movement of the left and he seems to want to get there by skipping over the twenty or so years of power the Republicans had between ascension and dissolution.

This unnattractive purity movement we have (and that you, sadly, seem to be signing on to) will bear no good fruit either for Democrats as a whole or for the positions it claims to espouse.  The coded attacks on good, liberal, mainstream Democrats ("feet of clay", for instance, means "coward") -- what's that in aid of?

And when it comes to Obama, the "movement" is being used in what seems to be a personal vendetta on Sirota's part over the Lamont campaign.  Why you've signed on to that is beyond me.  For instance, the material you link as a demonstration that "Levin and Obama must be glad to have gotten the Broder seal of approval" (your own blog post) contains no quotes or support at all for including Obama in Levin's comments.

Levin may not have the perfect position on Iraq but his statements do have one virtue -- they are a correct and factual statement of the situation.  Of course you're free to argue with him about whether or not that's the best position, or whether it can and should be changed, etc.  Your advice to him in your post ("Shut Up") is not, however, advancing any argument.

You should be quite familiar with the results of this kind of party splitting -- in New York the decision of a small but influential number of Democrats to sit out the 2001 mayoral race handed control of the city to Republicans for eight years (and possibly more).  While I have no problem with that result (having voted for the Republican) I would have thought you do.

Just this -- people who live in glass houses ought not to throw stones.  

BTD is working hard to tear down the only candidate who, at this admittedly early date, looks likely to challenge Clinton for the nomination.  This mirrors a position he took in 2001 which cost the Democrats an election.

That's all fine.  But he also has a long history of criticising my support for a Republican in that very election.  It's true that ripping on Dems is not precisely the same as actively supporting Republicans.  But it's also true that the decision of the Bronx machine to sit out the 2001 election did far more than my one paltry vote to put Bloomberg in office.

I see the same happening here with these needless personal attacks on Obama.  Sure, BTD will forget all about it if Obama is the nominee but the thousands of Democratic activists he'll have ginned up against Obama may not be so quick.

To be clear, if I had to choose I would rather than BTD continue to attack me for my Republican votes and give up his vendetta against Obama.  That would be considerably more useful in electing a Democratic in '08 and I rather enjoy my occasional dust-ups with BTD.