Posted by: McQ on Monday, November 12, 2007 So says Nora Ephrom at HuffPo. It's an interesting post, if for no other reason than to get a little peek inside the head of a "progressive" activist. For all that it matters, her lament is no different than that of many on the right concerning the Republican party. She says the top 5 reasons she lists for being a Democrat all say "Supreme Court". You hear the same from the right. The difference, however, is the "why" each side sees the SC as important. But that's a post for another time. She pretty much settles in to complaining about how bad the Democratic Congress has been. She makes the same arguments that I saw the right making when they had the majority there ("even if you can't get the bills passed, put them to a vote and make the Democrats defeat them!"). And, unsurprisingly, she finds Chuck Schumer not to her particular liking. Like much of the netroots community, she takes off after Schumer and his endorsement of Mukasey for the next AG. Her favored strategy is to reject Mukasey and make them nominate someone else (this based on Mukasey's waterboarding waffle). And if that person won't denounce waterboarding as torture, reject him or her as well. OK, again, no different really than the right screaming about a Republican Congress standing up against a Democratic president or acting like a majority when they are the majority. In fact, other than one single paragraph, Ephrom's entire piece is pretty much what both sides have said from time to time about their own parties. It was this paragraph however, that made it something else: It's especially hard to remember that the real enemies are the Republicans, when the Democrats tend to break your heart and the Republicans are just the boys you'd never go out with anyway.I sat there and thought, "wow, and here I thought those who'd attacked our country were the enemy". I've always considered the left as the political opposition. You kill enemies. You oppose the political opposition. You capture and incarcerate enemies. You defeat the political opposition at the polls by presenting better ideas and options. Etc. But this one paragraph goes a long way in explaining two things. BDS and the obvious wish by some on the left to see the US fail in Iraq. It probably explains a lot of other things as well, but those two immediately pop into my mind. Their enemy is a domestic political one, not one which can (and gleefully would) actually murder them (although if you delve into some of the more fevered swamps in the Netroots, no doubt you can find accusations that Bush wants to do that as well). And they've declared total war on that enemy and are waging a no-quarter fight for political supremacy, even if that means something like failure in Iraq. There's something fundamentally wrong and very dangerous with that sort of thinking. I'm not naive enough to think the same sort of thinking doesn't exist on the extreme right as well. Having lived through the Clinton years and seen some of the nonsense spouted then, I know better. But it was interesting to read this in a fairly innocuous political post which, for the most part I have no issue. A post that is considered fairly tame by Netroots standards and certainly doesn't seem to have stirred any controversy there. It was just casually thrown out there as if it was something with which everyone agrees. Perhaps it is that casualness which disturbs me most. If in fact Ephrom sees that as an accepted truth on the left, we're further along the road to our own political destruction than I imagined. |
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