A Show Of Hands In Your Ass

Yesterday, the folks at American Prospect started a little "suggestion box" (subsequently picked up by Daily Kos) in search of a 30 word sentence that accurately reflects what Liberalism stands for.

First, some thoughts from Bill Moyers in 2003:

Republicans still love a good brawl - they could appreciate the movie the Gangs of New York. Because they will claw, scratch, jam their knee to your groin and land an uppercut to the jaw after the bell has rung - and if they don't finish the job their partisan press will do it for them: Rush Limbaugh and the Darth Vaders of talk radio; the pamphleteers at the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and a host of publications aided by big business.

But where are the Democrats? As the Republicans were coming back from the wilderness - lean, mean and hungry - Democrats were busy assimilating their opponents' belief system. In no small part because they coveted the same corporate money, Democrats practically walked away from the politics of struggle, leaving millions of working people with no one to fight for them. We see the consequences all around us in what a friend of mine calls "a suffocating consensus." Even as poverty spreads, inequality grows, and our quality of life diminishes, Democrats have become the doves of class warfare.

Back to the American Prospect et al.; the beginnings of a determined effort (a) to copy the Republicans by rhetorically pigeonholing our political ideology, and (b) to actively seek out a "suffocating consensus" from a wide array of intellectually suspect survey participants. Four years may seem like a long time when you're watching Bush performing his pinched little giggle on television, but it's not such a long time when you've got to rebuild a national political party from the ground up. We don't need consensus. We need a goddamn leader.

AND ANOTHER THING: The biggest problem that the Democrats face isn't that we don't know what we believe, it's that we don't have any balls. The 90's made the GOP angry; they got tough and grew fangs. Likewise, 9/11 didn't change Bush's worldview or enhance his ability to lead; it just pissed him off. Note to Democrats: you know what you believe so stop bellyaching about your time "in the wilderness" and start fighting back. Pussies.