Who's to blame?
You know I love Digby but she's just wrong here.
I mean, how many times do we have to analyze just how racist, crazy or ill informed the conservatives are? How many angst ridden screeds of unsolicited advice to Obama on how to "energize" the base need to be written? Positive advances are virtually ignored by a certain subset of the big name "pro-left" bloggers in favor of rants that don't sound all that different from the Tea Party "can you hear me now" chest pounding to me.
As I said on twitter this morning, it may be fun and satisfying to mock the Tea Party, but they're kicking progressive ass in winning primaries. Seems to me running real progressives and actually winning some national level primaries on our side would energize the base just fine. We're not doing it and as I recall these same progs supported quite a few pretty conservative Dems just to get a Democratic majority in 06 and 08. But now it's Obama's fault because he can't get them to vote liberally?
A large part of this really is attributable to "it's the economy, stupid" but not all of it. Maybe it's time for the progressive left to quit snarking, stop their bitching about what can't be changed and start putting all that suppressed energy into organizing for better policy and better candidates, instead of blaming Obama for not clapping loud enough.
I'm not saying that if the GOP wasn't relentlessly attacking Obama that this woman would feel good about him. He hasn't been very successful at addressing her concerns and there are plenty of liberals who are critical of him as well. But even if he were able to allay her concerns about the economy and the future of the country, the exhaustion that comes from battling back these lunatics is what really takes its toll.It's not battling the lunatics that's exhausting me. I don't let them bait me anymore. I'm exhausted by the annoyance of watching high profile progressives endlessly battle the lunatics over nonsense and bitch out the President and Democrats for what they haven't done instead of affirmatively promoting progressive policies. It's the negativity on the left that tiring me out.
I mean, how many times do we have to analyze just how racist, crazy or ill informed the conservatives are? How many angst ridden screeds of unsolicited advice to Obama on how to "energize" the base need to be written? Positive advances are virtually ignored by a certain subset of the big name "pro-left" bloggers in favor of rants that don't sound all that different from the Tea Party "can you hear me now" chest pounding to me.
As I said on twitter this morning, it may be fun and satisfying to mock the Tea Party, but they're kicking progressive ass in winning primaries. Seems to me running real progressives and actually winning some national level primaries on our side would energize the base just fine. We're not doing it and as I recall these same progs supported quite a few pretty conservative Dems just to get a Democratic majority in 06 and 08. But now it's Obama's fault because he can't get them to vote liberally?
A large part of this really is attributable to "it's the economy, stupid" but not all of it. Maybe it's time for the progressive left to quit snarking, stop their bitching about what can't be changed and start putting all that suppressed energy into organizing for better policy and better candidates, instead of blaming Obama for not clapping loud enough.
posted by Libby Spencer at 6:44 PM
2 Comments:
...it may be fun and satisfying to mock the Tea Party, but they're kicking progressive ass in winning primaries....
I don't necessarily agree with this, progressives have had some big wins in house races, but I do agree the constant negativity is draining. But we DO have legitimate concerns. We're not the right, who had no problem shouting "clap louder" all of the years Bush was in office and then as soon as Obama got elected they suddenly are angry (remember when anger was a bad thing?) and rallying with their misspelled signs about how they want to "take their country back."
And that's another thing which is draining, which is the constant media double standard. We can NEVER get any traction in the press yet the craziest shit a Teanut farts out gets picked up by the MSM. This country is so fucked up right now and no one even seems to know it.
We do agree that the craziness in general is draining. It's not just any one thing. And I think everybody knows the country is fucked up but we all deal with in different ways.
I'm 58 years old. It's been even more fucked up than this before. Hippies and activists were getting killed in the 60s for their politics. That was worse but what made it easier to deal with was that the left mostly all pulled together in those days. It was more collobarative and less competitive.
Of course it was before the internets so there was more human space contact. And we connected through art and music and a thousand underground publications of the written word, not an impossible deluge of a million blogs and other social networks inside the intertubes.
I don't know. I'm just an old broad bitching on the internets. I'm tired and cranky today and wrote this on the fly. Just thinking out loud. Still thinking about it.
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