Taking It to the Dems

Avedon Carol at The Sideshow has a couple of good posts about the failure of Democrats to step up to the plate and swing for the fences lately. This is getting more and more frustrating to a lot of us in the progressive world. We realize that shouting at Republicans and pointing out how wrong they are in matters of policy is much like trying to eat applesauce with chopsticks -- theoretically possible, and kind of sweet at first, but difficult, messy and ultimately doomed to failure most of the time. We shouldn't have to keep applying swift kicks to the seat of the Democratic party to get it to listen to us.

The premise alluded to there is echoed in a post that Peter Daou of The Daou Report wrote last week (and that I kept meaning to link to, but never got around to it). Daou wonders how influential bloggers (and, by inference, other progressive activists) are on the Democratic party as a whole. His answer: not so much. We're looked at as mainly a new source of income for incumbents and Dem challengers, but our ideas are, in many cases, far too radical for the triangulating DLC Republican-Lite hacks to ever give more than lip service to (and often not even that). His ultimate point is that what we in the left of center blogosphere need to do is less shrill criticizing of Republicans and the current administration (though dog knows they deserve every word of it and then some) and more lighting of fires underneath the complacent, moving-to-the-center Dems who are supposedly our champions and representatives. It seems to me that support for the war in Iraq is the perfect place to start. Democrats who still are in favor of Bush's Blunder should just step aside -- now -- and make way for candidates who will express the will of the people and demand that we start bringing the troops home as soon as possible. Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, all of you Dems who waffle and equivocate and worry that you won't look patriotic enough if you tell the fucking truth about the war -- get ready to lose your jobs in the next couple years. And deservedly so.