Oh c’mon, Andy, you have no claim on anti-bias. Nor, unfortunately, do some others.

Oh yeah, you know who you are. Don’t pretend like you don’t know what you did or are doing. Not just you, but you, you, you, her, him, that guy, you over there, those of you journalists for hire just pretending to be a card-carrying blogospheroid. All of you. Even you.

You’ve abandoned every principle, every claim to ethical purity, and you have the gall to point your finger at anyone, everyone, all of us and them, and challenge them/us for somehow failing to live up to…. uh… something or other. You know I’m talking to you.

It began with Kucinich. “Oh,” you said, ” isn’t his agenda perfect. He’s always fought for the right stuff, he’s proposing the right stuff now, why do we need to look any further?”

And you thought privately “No way a past-life channeling, strident, rumpled, elvin liberal dwarf will ever get elected” and voted for somebody else. Mike Gravel, more of the same. He actually succeeded at doing stuff way back when, got things passed, unlike Dennis. “No way, he’s just an enjoyable, spot-on gadfly, but he can’t go anywhere.” And POOF!, you made him disappear.

Don’t look around, I mean YOU.

Chris Dodd, the most effective real liberal in the group, the guy who took on Bush, the telecoms, the Senate leadership, defending our Constitution. He stood up for all of us. Oh sure, you Paypalled a contribution, but you knew even then you weren’t actually going to vote for him. He’s just not electable. Right. Because YOU wouldn’t elect him.

By then, you’d also dismissed Bill Richardson, who had the best foreign policy credentials of the whole gang. The best record of support for American Indian tribes. Solid Latino support. And foreign policy is the top thing presidents actually do, with the least dependency on the other branches of government. He had the best ads. Offered the fastest exit from Iraq. “Oh, but he’s a little awkward in debate.” You voted to sustain the high principle of superficialism instead. Pragmatic, you called it.

Biden? Too hawkishly conservative, too much the insider. I know, I know, the finger I point at you, I also point at me.

And after Iowa, 97% of us had already weighed in that it had to be one of the three safer bets. The three ‘most electable’ not the three most liberal. Each with a veneer of progressive about them because of their support of this or that issue, but all three sufficiently moderate that any one of them could have been sponsored by the DLC. You know it’s true. Slightly different shades of centrism.

Oh sure, you hoped that Edwards had evolved like RFK had, because of the mess of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, into a true liberal champion. He genuinely cared about people who did without, the working poor, the marginalized. Or did he? His one Senate term didn’t reflect it, but from the time he left, his positions grew clearer, more populist, more compassionate. Elizabeth was an outspoken liberal. John still hedged on certain issues: gay marriage and Iran, most notably. And some found him inauthentic because he had a Southern accent or was too pretty. He had the Paul McCartney curse: he couldn’t be real enough because John Lennon existed. Oh that bias is at least PC, isn’t it?

It would not take long before doubts crept in. Lots of liberals support him, but a lot of his support still seemed to be white males. He may have even left the race because of that, knowing he didn’t want to be viewed as the last refuge of guys whose motivations might have more to do with race and gender. Whatev. Four primaries and he was gone.

For the past five weeks then, everyone, it seems, has gone fairly mental.

Hillary Clinton, perceived as the front runner since November of 2004. With about a month of looking less inevitable, she’s alternated between the confident leader, the vulnerable real human being, the victim of rampant misogyny, the target of the anti-Clinton corporate media, the trailblazing pioneer, the ultimate political chameleon, disliked for being shunned by The Village and disliked for being too old school insider. Every legitimate complaint one might have with her political record and policy proposals cannot possibly be about that to Hillary worshipers. Those who live vicariously through her, viewing her as the Great Woman’s Hope, are quck to point the fickle finger of sexism at any critic. The blogosphere has failed her because we did ‘a’ not ‘b’ or because we should, at least, be attacking the corporate media, or whatev. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

And the Obamaphiles. Any critique or reservation about him is rooted in racism, boomerism, unkewlness. We must be blind to his transformative message, the hopefulness he presents to people nationally and globally. Completely oblivious to the half of the nation and world who see a woman as transformative, too. Rejecting any move Clinton makes as devious and destructive and dishonest, no matter how ordinary and benign most of those decisions have been. And too often, so idealistic that it displays ignorance and denial about the reality that politics just ain’t pretty. You can dress it up, modify it some, but it’s the type of competitive sport that cannot ever be perfectly clean unless one enters it with a plan to lose.

The biases are endless and eagerly utilized. Obama the Muslim. Clinton the lesbian. Can Team Clinton color him darker? Can Team Obama say ‘you’re likeable enough, Hillary?’ without the self-assured kangaroo courts jumping up to convict him of being condescending? Some of the messaging is provably deliberately dishonest. And some is guesswork, interpretations of off the cuff responses and their hidden meanings.

The reality is every one of you is loaded with biases. And I am, too. Some is formed by experience, but overgeneralized. Some may be completely legit. It takes constant self-introspection to understand our own biases, to root out and reject those that lack real merit and to retain and defend those biases that continually ring true.

And now we’re faced with another two to three months of primaries, and I fully expect to hear the same old shit, continually rehashed, recycled and flung with the accuracy of blindfolded and spun people trying to pin the tail on the pinata.

Effective? Not.

If you hate Obama or hate Clinton, I think it’s a direct reflection on something too biased in you. That’s my bias. They’re both politicians, not some enemy out to ruin your life. The only time I think politicians deserve such personal emotionalism is when they’ve made a choice to deliberately harm someone. Take Bush for example or many in his administration. They deliberately cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Some politicians make bad choices that inadvertently cause damage and deserve disdain and critique for that. But to hate Obama or Clinton strikes me as a sign of immaturity. And of course, my biases are better than yours.

Some of my irrational biases are awfully hard to shake: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton… the prospect makes me think ‘why did we bother having a revolution against monarchy if we’re going to take 24 or 28 years of that?’ I don’t want to shake that bias, though. After 20 years, my perception is we’ve had Republican and Republican Light. Nobody’s going to dislodge that sticking point from my craw. I won’t vote for Nader in November, but I may ‘waste’ my vote writing in Dodd. Clinton’s political record and policy proposals, coupled with my anti-monarchy bias, simply yield me that impractical course. (And is the claim that she’s ‘divisive’ be entirely media spin, when we see her campaign leaking stuff so regularly about stuff like this?)

Marginalize and berate me forever, blame me if McCain is elected. You won’t be the first, nor will you succeed in changing my mind. Call me sexist if you want to really be condescending or morally superior. Whatever helps get you through your own internal rationales. Go ahead, be my guest.

I haven’t endorsed Obama and I won’t, in the primaries. I’m not sold on the critique that he’s wrongly using right wing talking points at times. I think he’s a student of how to reach certain people that his messages can’t reach to any other way. I certainly have been skeptical that a top concern of Americans is to overcome partisan divisions. What I think many want is simply forward progress beyond the type of gridlock that’s made Congress spectacularly inept for the past two decades. And if Obama’s way bulldozes some of the obstacles out of the path to permit more progress to occur, that’s not a bad thing. I may be skeptical but since none have forged this particular path so forcefully, I can at least acknowledge that maybe it can work.

My biggest critique about him is not his oratorical powers nor his charisma. Both are genuine and though the latter gets scoffed at as inconsequential, charisma - put to good uses - is a plus. And none have possessed as much of it in US politics as Obama, in the past 40 years.

I fret most about his alliances with Blue Dog Democrats, because they’ve impeded the efforts of progressives ever since the major Civil Rights bills of the Sixties. But if Obama’s alliances produce some quid pro quo legislative victories, that would be a big step forward. The simple fact is that he’s claiming he has an untested way, and there’s enough truth to that that I can at least admit there’s a possibility that it might work.

That’s hardly an endorsement of an Obamaphile. I have one known quantity whose record tells me I can expect marginal gains in domestic policy, and a traditional, imperialist mindset in foreign policy - superior to Bush and McCain, but hardly progressive or new. I have another unknown quantity with few visible errors in their record, clearly competent and just as clearly willing to pursue non-traditional approaches to foreign and domestic policy making.

One provides me a sense of recovery from the Bush years, but any generic Democrat provides that. The other offers no guarantees, but some definite maybes. So I think it natural I lean towards that. And I see nothing that is a red flag disqualifier to prevent my lean.

Maybe that’s bias, but it’s not built on some ideological ism or rampant emotionalism, nor some faux claim to victimhood. It’s not about some empty rhetorical appeal. It’s about a tiny sliver of hope amid a forest of cynicism and a fog of biases.

I have no reason to hide any biases of mine. My feet have stunk sometimes, too. And I’ve faced an abundance of marginalization all my life and it’s ultimately taught me to be more transparent, more outspoken, because I’ll be damned if I’ll surrender my conscience to avoid being driven into social or financial oblivion. I don’t label myself a victim for what I’ve endured. It’s just life’s not always fair and some we encounter make it more or less fair.

So my biases, to me, are understandable. Yours likely are, to you. I just don’t assert that everyone should adopt my biases. That’s just too arrogant to my way of thinking. I’ll advance my opinions and hope they possess more reason than bias. And I hope the same can be said of your opinions, too. I’m far more prone to consider them when I sense they’re rooted in objectivity.

When I sense someone’s beating around the bush too long or sense they’re trying to bully me by tossing around charges and calling people names, I start tuning out. And in a sizable portion of the progressive blogosphere - but not the majority - there are some I’ve tuned out that I once considered allies. Some are pro-Clinton, some are pro-Obama. It’s not because of who they support. It’s because of their methods and the rank hypocrisy that comes with the failure to see how much of their bias is interfering with their aim to persuade.

I’ve likely fallen short on some topic somewhere since I began blogging more than five years ago. But I think I’ve seen more progressive folks falling short in this primary contest than on any other topic since the inception of political blogging. I sure hope that changes because neither of these candidates deserves such adulation nor such personal animosity. Both strike me as unreasonable biases. Sure, as a white male without the oppression of a glass ceiling, how can I possibly understand?

And yet, I do. Most people endure many ceilings and practically speaking, most of them are far closer to us than that one that’s limited about a billion Americans while allowing a mere 43 passage through it.

I can handle me and my biases, but what can I possibly do about the likes of you?