Earlier I mentioned Chris Bowers of MyDD.com as an example of a blogger who definitely goes against the ridiculous image portrayed by "Dr. Chuck" Williams in the laughable garbage that passed somehow for an opinion column in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. Well, I am happy to pass along the news that Patrick Murphy has been endorsed by Chris and ActBlue as "the next netroots candidate." That will provide a lot of fuel, so to speak, to the "Murphy train" that will need to chug full steam out of the station to beat Mikey Fitz in November and slog through all of the Repug garbage that they are probably getting ready to heave at Patrick as soon as it's ready.In Chris's great article, I think that it's important to highlight this paragraph.
It is also important to note that Michael Fitzpatrick, the incumbent in the race, is perhaps the most vehemently anti-netroots member of Congress. The first bill he has authored in Congress seeks to restrict public access to social networking sites, including sites such as Dailykos, Blogger, MySpace, and even MyDD. Ostensibly the bill is to protect children of child predators, but considering that it is written by an endangered incumbent who, as much as any other Republican in Congress, understands the potential power of the progressive netroots, one can only conclude that Michael Fitzpatrick is trying to curb the progressive netroots in order to save his own seat.I realize that local papers such as The Bucks County Courier Times are going to completely miss this point, but I think its importance cannot be overstated. Some of the bilious right-wing knuckle draggers up here are piling on against Patrick in their letters to the paper (Repug sympathizers, no doubt, who wouldn't vote against Fitzpatrick anyway), but THIS is the true goal of Fitzpatrick's fraud MySpace bill (the phrase "social networking sites" is dangerously vague). After all, it's so unlike a Repug to advocate legislation that, as if my magic, ends up having a goal that accomplishes nothing like what was originally intended except to hurt a Democrat (e.g., the whole "net neutrality" argument), isn't it?
The important thing, though, is that the netroots has made it official that we are SOLIDLY behind Patrick Murphy. Getting the word out is good (by the way, Patrick plans to meet with Joe Wilson of "Niger Letter" renown, on June 6th), and financial support is even better (I plan to chip in soon also).
Update 9/22: To supplement my comment response to Williams, I present this from kos (and the decision to run again on the economy - oh maw gawd!!! - is more DLC, Third Way nonsense that has nothing to do with the rank-and-file liberals Williams despises). Arianna hits the nail on the head; the Dem leadership is out to lunch, and THAT is why we lose, not because of Williams' ridiculous caricatures.
2 comments:
I felt that I articulated a pretty convincing argument... don't you think? Are liberals blameless in the discussions regarding our lack of control in Congress and/or the White House? What is wrong with us that we keep getting our tails handed to us on a silver platter...00, 02, 04, 06??? Am I no longer a "good" Democrat because I offer open and honest criticism of my own party? How would we characterize the GOP if they offered similar rhetoric when one of their own offers a differing view?
Best Regards,
"Dr. Chuck" Williams
Please allow me to quote some particularly repugnant words from your original column in June:
"Liberals are elitists"
"The stench of elitist, intellectual posturing..."
"Folks who think too much..."
"Nerds taking over the frat house..."
"Our values and morals are better than others..."
"Our 'elitism' is worse than Patrick Buchanan's hate-filled rhetoric..."
"People were right to leave us..."
That's not constructive criticism. That's character assassination (and by the way, as I noted in my response, you did not provide a single documented instance of what you were talking about to back up your argument).
I'm not saying liberals are blameless for the current state of things. I'm saying that the main reason that things are as they are is that the Democrats have often demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to differentiate themselves from the Republicans on key issues (such as today with this supposed "compromise" over Dubya's interrogations), and I know that there are people who will vote Democratic in a few weeks only by default. That is sad and indicates that we have work to do (though Dr. Dean and his 50-state effort is laying a fine foundation, which you conveniently neglected to mention...and that stupid remark about "nerds taking over the frat house" is supposed to be a shot at the people I mentioned in response like Chris Bowers, Matt Stoller and Albert Yee, I suppose, who are in the trenches making a difference, and not reading some artsy book in their Birkenstocks or whatever the hell that cheap cliché of yours was).
"When one of the GOP offers a differing view," huh? I can give you a perfect example, and that is the nearly-successful campaign of Pat Toomey (who wrote what was supposed to be a companion piece in the Inquirer that day as I recall) against Arlen Specter in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in 2004. There was no accommodation of Specter's "centrism" by the Club For Growth, which did all it could to support Toomey, with Specter saved only by a last-minute appearance by Bush on a campaign stop (with Bush still having passable approval numbers then pre-Katrina).
And surely you must have taken note that the GOP has perfected this little game where some senior party members (Lindsay Graham, McCain, Hagel) pretend to stand up to Dubya, but then end up signing off on legislation or some other deranged policy that is only capitulation to what Dubya wanted all along (as I noted earlier, McCain, Graham and Warner did that today with Dubya's interrogation policy). So the fact is that they have offered opposing rhetoric, with nothing of course to back it up, which probably was their intention anyway.
It would have been so much more representative of what's going on right now to write a column about the netroots trying to revitalize the Democrats and drive the party away from this centrist, accommodationist nonsense that has done nothing but ensure our second-class status (and go ahead and mention that that's a divisive battle at times) instead of concocting your drivel stating that the Democrats are merely supposed to tell people what they want to hear to get elected and not sound like folks who "think too much" (I seem to recall that Dubya tarred Gore with that in 2000, but stiff, stuffy Al Gore happened to dead right about global warming while Dubya called him "ozone man" back then). That would have been a much more interesting column, and a welcome change from the typical "divided, elitist Democratic Party" narrative that you shamelessly fed into. But that would have required actual research and analysis versus cheap insults, so I can see why you weren't up to the job.
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