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Political weblogging is starting to bore me.

People blog because they feel they have something to say. That feeling is driven by two things - a desire to explore their opinions, and a belief that what they have to say is new.

Political blogging was thrilling a couple of years ago, when it was full of discovery of the other communities. Many of us had a hunger to develop our fledgling opinions. The first time I wrote about Iraq, opinions like "reducing our dependence on foreign oil" felt fresh and a bit politically dangerous. We were talking about Congressional amendments and liberals were actually arguing about whether Bush was on the level. Each time we found someone else that agreed with us, or a community that did, it was thrilling. Now we know that Bush had firmed up his Iraq plans three months before that point and was just trying to cynically use Congress and the U.N. to manipulate a justification. Now we have our places to go and reinforce our opinions.

So... the center-left political weblogging group has arrived. It's not so much a matter of firming up opinions anymore. It's more about getting them represented in the popular press.

It's a worthy cause, but I find it tiring. I really don't enjoy writing letters to editors and sending off angry email missives to columnists. I don't enjoy calling customer service departments to complain about things, either. I also don't see it as my calling.

Here's another thing - the rise of large community sites like Daily Kos can serve as a discouragement. You can go over there and find just about any center-left political opinion, repeated infinitely. There's so much reinforcement going on that it can often sound like dogma or rote.

I really hate dogma and rote. In personal situations, I can usually sense when someone says something mindlessly. It usually points to a blind spot.

That's the penalty of too much reinforcement - it actually creates blind spots. It helps people get radicalized.

Occasionally, I'll get drawn into challenging viewpoints that are commonly held on the left. My most recent argument was about how the living wage isn't all it's cracked up to be, and how expanding an EITC-like policy is often a more effective and efficient way to go. Other times I've argued strongly about the results of the 2004 elections, and how Bush was actually the democratic winner. I've debunked more than a couple stupid statistical studies that "prove" 2004 fraud. I regularly oppose the more extreme abuses of the Peak Oil arguments. And I'm regularly opposed to isolationism (both in foreign policy and in trade), and that's a conversation that is too-long ignored among the left.

But how worthwhile is it to invest energy in shoring up the base? That's not where change really happens, and it's not where the potential conversions are. It's something I can get wrapped up in when I feel like having a fight, but it isn't productive.

So it ends up begging the question, what is productive at this point? We're at the very early stages of Bush's second term. Weblogging continuing on its past trajectory won't be very interesting, not if it's just more people posting thoughts, commenting, complaining to each other, and occasionally mailbombing some hapless columnist.

The next few steps are different than the last few steps, and attract a different sort of person. The next few steps are very activist-heavy. More blog-based PACs with press releases, pundits, protests, ads, and fundraising. What's next is hit squads. I was drawn to the community-building aspects, opinion development, and engineering truth-based consensus. There doesn't seem to be much appetite for that lately.