My friend Jason Kottke runs one of the smartest blogs on the web. Yet today, when he clearly had outlined a conversation about political ads on his blog, the subset of his readers who chose to comment ended up starting an idiotic partisan debate. What makes these people tick?
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While I agree that Jason clearly outlined the conversation, I'm not sure how you can complain when it gets partisan considering Jason's outline was partisan. He's saying look at these cool ads that I agree with, how can we get more Republicans to view these so they'll vote Kerry.
At that point, the post ceased to be about the ad, and became about partisan activism. To then groan when the comments take that meme and run with it seems silly.
And in any case, once you open up commenting to the public you can't expect to steer the conversation only to topics you like.
How could people *not* become "stupid" on the web if stupid means that they recognize that the Republicans have been smart/evil (depending on your views) enough to make politics into a war and frame it so that they can win it more often than not no matter how "stupid" their platforms are because they are facing a weak, disjointed enemy who would rather feel good about themselves than win elections. People have 80hr/week jobs, have 1,000 ads a day shouting information at them, kids to take care of, and 2 hour long commutes. Instead of fighting this, the Republicans take advantage of this and dumb down their message to support this, and people (sadly?) adore this. Democrats are finally becoming more partisan, inflamatory, and competitive. The Republicans have been fighting a war against an enemy who has been trying to play nice and give the benefit of the doubt about the inherent good of their adversaries (the Republicans), but the Republicans have had no such idea in their campaigns and it shows. Giving your lunch money to the school bully before he even threatens to beat you up is not "being the bigger man" when your lunch money is the election wins that can stop the Iraq war, fund AIDS, prevention, and give children the education they need to compete.
Democrats have never been able to understand that nothing matters unless you WIN elections. I agree that it makes people argue stupid/partisan things often, but being right/smart/etc. doesn't matter if you lose elections does it?