Let me reiterate: These people are not the base. No base of a movement would turn on its own and willfully seek to exclude a demographic it should be reaching out to embrace (the working class, specifically the Southern and rural Midwestern working class). No state branch of the Republican Party and 49 state branches of the Democratic Party would elect a county official of its administration who spent most of his time crying online to all and sundry about how totally useless their party's President was. But Ventura County, in California, elected a co-chair of its Democratic party who has all but given up on supporting the President to the extent that he's a pejorative influence on anyone even thinking of voting in the 2012 election, much less supporting the President. (See David O Atkins's Twitter feed, @DavidOAtkins; specifically his exchanges with more pragmatically minded Democratic supporters, for proof in the first person that the extreme Left is as bloody narrow-minded as their brethren on the Right).
You see, these people - people like the whiny Atkins (and I've reserved a particularly special blog to come dedicated to his own brand of bigotry and exclusion), the white male privilegists who've managed to turn the Daily Kos website into a bastion of sexism and segregation from the Left, and the ubiquitous band of Firebagging trolls who are desperately trying to set up residency on the growing list of individual pragmatic Progressive blogs who are pushing back on their bullshit, their lies and their willfully misinformative celebrity talking head icons - are a danger to the Democratic Party and to the sociological way forward for our country.
If anyone doesn't think that the 2012 Election isn't going to be all-out culture war, then you've got another think coming. This is about whether or not public education from K-12 remains intact as we know it. This is about a woman's right to choose and about her right to determine her own reproductive life. This is about the future of Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare - and, NO, the President isn't about to cut any of that.
This is about understanding English language vocabulary - like realising that "reform" is a positive word meaning "to make better" instead of misguidedly believing it means "to cut."
This is all about common sense winning over stupidity, and right now, the Progressive Left, is one of the most useful tools the GOP has in its battle for the hearts, minds and soul of the American future.
They love to see dissent on the Left, particularly, since the extreme Left has spent the past 3 years focusing on fighting and belittling the President as much as they have. That's helped the Republicans.
They love watching the CBC, led by Maxine Waters, snipe and gripe at the President. The GOP knows that those EmoProgs urging the likes of Waters and Co on don't realise that Waters is, herself, a cynical politician, one of the most corrupt in Washington, who is using big-mouth tactics in criticizing the President to divert attention from her impending ethics trial.
They love the fact that Ron Paul, the Stormfront-endorsed Republican Presidential candidate, has promised a seat in his Cabinet to EmoProg favourite, Dennis Kucinich, even promising to create Kucinich's dream department, the "Department of Peace." A fantasy combination of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, two evil elves clothed in a faux moral disguise, would send the EmoProgs flocking to vote for Paul, simply because both men favour legalising pot.
Oh well. When you're stoned 24/7, you might not notice that Ron Paul's "property rights" mean a reinforcement of Jim Crow laws or that Kucinich is pallin' around with dodgy dictators. When he's not plotting with Gaddafi against the US government, he's rollicking around Syria kissing Assad's assad.
The GOP loves all of this. They love watching the EmoProgs back and support these losers, especially when the people they defend take the moral high ground to criticize the President - even when that means, in the cases of Waters, the CBC and Dennis Kucinich, that these legislators are actually abnegating their own responsibility in governing.
The GOP loves this, because they're watching the Democrats do what we do best: implode. And, boy, this implosion is going to be bigger than the one we suffered in 1980. That lasted 12 years and gave us the Big Dog. This will last at least forty, and there ain't no Jesus at the end.
The GOP loves this, because they love watching the Democrats quit before we've even got ahead.
I'd love to be able to tell these spoiled brats either to fall out or fall in line, but they won't listen. Many people have tried to engage with them, but they employ Teabagging tactics of moving the goalposts, making themselves the victims or finally just ugly snarking and name-calling. They hate supporters of the President (Obamabots or Obots) as much, if not more, than they do the Rightwing.
I can't tell them. I can't talk to them anymore, but I came across a comment, made by VCThree, the pragmatic Progressive blogger and Tweeter, in response to a Firebagging troll who'd tried to create a presence of dissension on one of AngryBlackLady's excellent blogs. I'll let VCThree use his own words, because this is the best comeback to EmoProgs I've ever seen (the emphatic parts are mine):-
Oh, stop it. What you are is a bunch of quitters. Those progressives have done nothing but kneecap their own progress and quit for well past 30 years now–over the course of my entire lifetime–and they’re set to fold and quit again. You guys don’t fight; you lay down your arms, then whine when you get ran over, and then blame everybody else for your failure to do.
In 2000, I saw how you did your own hero, Vice President Gore, with much of the same undercutting and whining you’re doing now. I could get into how you failed to get all the toppings on your pizza by not working Congress, but seeing as you quitters don’t think Congress exists, and you’ve bought into that Imperial Presidency bullshit you were selling from 2005-2008, why waste the time?
I’m just going to lay it out there: The CBC doesn’t do shit, period, except when it’s members are taking bribes for themselves. Dennis Kucinich doesn’t do shit; hasn’t written so much as an economic bill in his entire tenure in Congress. But he (allegedly) was trying to help Libya blackmail his own government, so there’s that. And West, Smiley, et. al., don’t do shit; all those years of Black State of the Unions where they sit around discussing the same fucking issues, never yielding a plan, never building on forward momentum; just a promise to meet again in a year, pimp whoever’s book, and make jokes.
Yet some of y’all want credit for door knocks? Fuck your door knocks. You didn’t follow up with calls to your senator or representative to get the things you claim you wanted–didn’t call to close Gitmo, didn’t call to pressure them on the public option–but you want credit for door knocks, like that shit was worth $100 per door. Get out of here.
Stop overstating your effect on politics. What’s plain to see, here, is that you voted for a president, and intended to sit back on your fucking asses, and watch as your dreams of progressive utopia came true. You thought this was Disney World or some shit. Well…it isn’t. It never has been. But until you start realizing this, you will continue to live in a mirage, and quit at every difficulty that arises.
Frankly, I don’t care what you do in 2012. But stop fucking our country up, and stop fucking over the people you claim to want to help, because you didn’t get shit from Column A or Column B on your personal list of whateverthehell accomplished by whoever you think should serve as your progressive wizard-lord. I’ve watched this bullshit for 12 years, now. I’ve studied on the 38 years this act has been playing. I have had enough.
Step up, show your work, or get the fuck out of here.
Bottom line: The President always reiterated, even when campaigning as Senator Obama, that the change we can believe in lies within us. Change comes bottom upwards, not trickledown. Lord knows, we had enough of trickledown, and that worked so nicely, didn't it?
Bottom-up change takes time to effect, even years. It's the long ballgame. It takes patience and endurance. Sometimes, there are setbacks, but you don't give up. And small, incremental change is there to build upon. That's how the Republican party shed itself of its liberal and moderate Rockefeller and Hatfield types. That's how it convinced the working classes of the South, the rural Midwest and the Rust Belt that the GOP viewed their particular interests far better than the Democratic Party, their former natural habitat did. That's why what you're seeing now, and what you underestimated in the wake of the 2008 electoral win, didn't happen overnight.
It took forty years. And it started with Gary Hart, who wrested control of the Democratic Party from the Hubert Humphrey-types, threw what he reckoned to be the demographic crumbs to a Republican Party that was already a budding brew of Birchers and Dominionists. The party of the working class became the party of the Coastal elites, disdainfully championing the "middle class" (if it ever existed), whilst willfully ignoring the working class and the working poor.
The battle lines are being drawn now in preparation for 2012. Even the so-called liberal media of MSNBC, Michael Moore, Bill Maher, Joan Walsh and Markos Moulitsas aren't afraid to dogwhistle the nation's first African American President, even to the point of revising history and turning Hillary Clinton into a flaming Progressive beacon of light.
I call bullshit. I echo VCThree.
Step up, show your work, or get the fuck out of here.
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