Posted by: Dale Franks on Tuesday, July 29, 2008 This election cycle is just stunning. I really am amazed at the level of sheer insanity being played out on the Left side of the political spectrum. Just scroll down on the current home page here at QandO. One idiot doesn't want a bomber pilot as president. Another idiot wants to tax the top 50% extra to defray the costs of their global warming burden. South Central LA may have all new fast food joints banned, presumably because they're keeping Whole Foods from opening up a combination market and organic tofu deli straddling Crip and Blood territories. All I can think of is that it's because the Left is now positive they'll sweep the election in November. "Finally, we'll have a real progressive in the White House, not some half-Republican like Bill Clinton. And we'll control the Senate! We'll finally get to remake the country the way we always wanted, back when we were dope-smoking hippies at Berkeley in '68!" So, they're all getting in their tax bids now, preparing to exult in the moment when the running dogs of the capitalist-imperialist forces finally get what's coming to them. And, apparently, they won't be the only ones. The French Revolution, as is well known, quickly devolved from "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" into internecine bloodletting. Former leading revolutionaries were packed off to the guillotine in job lots for the unspeakable crime of, "inauthenticity". Now, before the election has even taken place, Glenn Greenwald is pointing to the new perpetrators of inauthenticity. He's upset that the Democratic-controlled Congress hasn't done enough, fast enough. The problem, you see, is the inauthentic, blue-dog Democrats. Naturally, he believes they should be slated for elimination...politically, that is. If simply voting for more Democrats will achieve nothing in the way of meaningful change, what, if anything, will? At minimum, two steps are required to begin to influence Democratic leaders to change course: 1) Impose a real political price that they must pay when they capitulate to — or actively embrace — the right's agenda and ignore the political values of their base, and 2) decrease the power and influence of the conservative "Blue Dog" contingent within the Democratic caucus, who have proved excessively willing to accommodate the excesses of the Bush administration, by selecting their members for defeat and removing them from office. And that means running progressive challengers against them in primaries, or targeting them with critical ads, even if doing so, in isolated cases, risks the loss of a Democratic seat in Congress.Because the voters in Nebraska and Mississippi are just longing to vote for a real progressive. This, too, is insane. There's a reason that Virginia voters were offered a former Reagan Administration official as the Democratic party's candidate for the senate. There's a reason that the blue dogs hold seats in the Congress. And it's a pretty simple reason: The voters in those districts are uninterested in voting for smelly hippies. They may not particularly like what the Republican Party has become, but that doesn't mean they're willing to sign on with San Fran Nan either. In most of these districts, we're talking about Republican voters. They may be disgusted enough with the Republicans pull the lever for a Democratic candidate who's an ex-marine major, loves God and guns, and who also happens to think that the poor need a better shake than they're getting. But if you think they're gonna vote for a "progressive", whose message to them will essentially be perceived as, "Vote for me, you ignorant, inbred, Jesus freaks," then you're just deranged. You run blue dog Democrats in those districts because they're the only Democrats with anything like a chance for victory. As soon as a candidate starts to get that Frisco patchouli reek about him...he's gone. How dissociated with the electorate in those areas do you have to be to believe otherwise? Do you honestly think that districts who voted for both George W. Bush and his dad—twice—are actually pining for a true progressive to show them the way out of the wilderness? Madness. |
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