Oh my.

I'm in the midst of a mad social whirl this weekend (the Brilliant and Beautiful Bride of Upper Left danced my legs off at a holiday ball last night and we're off for an open house with friends in a few minutes), but I want to take a minute for this one.

During a brief email exchange with Matt Stoller yesterday, I got a note saying that he'd just been tossed from an event at the Democratic State Chair's conclave in Orlando "...because I blog." He wasn't, in fact, the only one. Joe Trippi and Jerome Armstrong also got the boot. Apparently someone decided to apply a "no press" rule to the bloggers in attendance, although they weren't, as far as I know, credentialed press but were there as invited guests of participants.

Jerome has an extended version of the story here, and newly elected Oregon DNC member Jenny Greenleaf (also a blogger) offers some instructive notes in the comments appended to Jerome's post.

All I know for sure is that this was handled about as poorly as possible. What could the organizers have been thinking? What did they think the bloggers might leak that would be more damaging than "We got thrown out."?

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

As I wrote in a response to a comment Matt left on my previous post...

What there isn't time for, though, in my opinion, is trying to rebuild a Party from scratch after throwing out all the folks like me, or to resist inevitable and necessary change by trying to keep out folks like you.

And as I reminded him in response to his email...

...nobody ever said our Party doesn't have idiots, too.

Of course, nobody ever said we have to put the idiots in charge, or leave them there, either...

Ya know, maybe I am a 'Reform' Democrat after all...