Sunday, June 10, 2012

Sunday Stuff

Kudos to Martin Bashir for calling out Little Timmeh for being a Beltway sycophant (here - and by the way, the private sector REALLY IS DOING FINE)…


…and by the way, speaking of the insufferable status quo, I happened to come across this item featuring another hand-wringing liberal, albeit one who put his money where his proverbial mouth is (h/t Atrios), and I have a few reactions.

The author apologizes for engaging the wingnutosphere on their stupidity and thus indirectly validating their talking points. Sorry, but I don’t automatically consider that to be validation. The miscreants on the right do their very best to poison our political dialogue, and we’re supposed to just let their crap go unanswered?

The problem with that thinking is that it utterly ignores the so-called “independent voters” who, basically, decide our elections any more and are prone to believe this stuff as gospel because they make up their minds about ten seconds before they enter the voting booth (not in all cases, though, I'll admit). And another problem isn’t that we engaged the right-wing crap poisoning our dialogue – the real problem is that it went unanswered for so long that it became enshrined as “conventional wisdom” (The Sainted Ronnie R and his “welfare queens,” Bob Casey Sr. being denied the opportunity to speak at the Democratic National Convention in 1992 supposedly because he was pro-life, Al Gore claiming he invented the Internet…all of that garbage).

Yes, the Democratic Party needs to do a better job of explaining why A CARBON TAX IS A GOOD THING, and THE DREAM ACT IS A GOOD THING, and THE STIMULUS WAS A GOOD THING, and THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT IS A GOOD THING, and on and on and on. But that’s because what passes for the Democratic Party “leadership” these days doesn’t have the spine that it should have inherited from its predecessors such as FDR, Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ, Jimmy Carter, etc., not because some impertinent left-wing bloggers such as yours truly take it upon themselves to speak truth to bullshit.

…and this song comes to me when I think of this wretched 112th Congress (typo at the end, by the way).

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