D-Day makes a plea for his parents the blogosphere to stop fighting. The use of strike through text aside, I think he’s raising a valid concern here:

The tactics are eerily reminiscent of our friends on the right, and how they use character assassination to discredit our candidates. I don’t understand the circular firing squad here. The candidates are generally as decent as a couple of cautious, centrist politicians can be. They were pushed to the left by John Edwards, and garnered massive followings that can be mobilized to hold them accountable. Either way it’ll be up to us in the end to facilitate that mobilization. Do we really want half the ‘sphere to react to some capitulation by the next President with a bunch of I-told-you-so’s? To say nothing of the possible nightmare scenario of a brokered convention and superdelegates picking the nominee.

I don’t know if there’s a way to stop this; the snowball is rapidly moving downhill. But there ought to be something. The primary itself is not negative; online it’s a sewer, however. And the movement isn’t old and robust enough to already be cracking at the seams.

I’m no fan of pie fights, but I would say that for the most part my impression is that they aren’t taking place in the way  that D-Day fears in a systemic way by bloggers. Rather, they seem to be more perpetrated (or perpetuated?) by diarists and commenters. While D-Day picks out a number of instances where respected bloggers delve into the muck when talking about the presidential candidates, that’s hardly representative of the bulk of the coverage.

Moreover, while I think Clinton and Obama are both acceptable candidates that most Democrats, online and offline, will be content with, there’s no reason for the online community to hold fire when they do stupid things like accept debates on Fox News or skip key votes on the Constitution.

So yes, while I do wish the discourse in some corners of the blogosphere about the candidates was less rancorous, I’m not terribly concerned about it being as systemic as D-Day. That said, please stop.