Remember, You're Unpatriotic for Not Supporting God's Own Party

President Bush in his weekly radio broadcast (read at your own risk - may ruin your appetite):

"Our efforts in Iraq and the broader Middle East will require more time, more sacrifice and continued resolve."

Let's look at who's not sacrificing:

"The very rich and the merely rich are fighting over the fate of the estate tax. So far, the very rich are winning."

Let's look who is:

"Lawmakers are drafting proposals that would cut billions of dollars from the growth of Medicaid, slice into student loans just as students return to college, pare back food stamps and trim farm price supports in the midst of a midwestern drought."

Why hasn't one Democrat made the connection - repeatedly, loudly, articulately, passionately -between Bushco's tax cuts, Bushco's boner over making the tax cuts permanent, and the utter immoral idiocy of Bush calling for sacrifice? Why hasn't one Democrat offered a plan for Iraq that would increase spending on, oh, say body armor and armored vehicles, paid for by money recovered by rescinded tax cuts?

Bush calls for sacrifice? How about asking the people who can sacrifice MOST to sacrifice MOST?

We Don't Want to Be Like Them

There is much self-gnashing amongst us Liberals and Democrats that we don't have a better plan than letting the implosion of Bushco implode. New polls out today show support of Bush at 36%, less than Nixon during Watergate. Details of a new constitution for Iraq suggest that Bushco is perfectly willing to allow for a diminution - hell, elimination - of women's rights in "democratic" Iraq, and John Robert's apparently would approve, what, given his attitude towards equal pay for equal work for women. And yet, ledes in today's MSM heavyweights NYT and WP trill with glee that Democrats and Liberals are, get this, unwilling to conspire together to form just the monolithic juggernaut of sycophants, yes men, blind ideologues, and cheerleaders that got us into this steaming cowplop in the first place.

I, for one, fifteen months out from the midterm elections, welcome a good little civil war here on the Left. Me, I'm proud to say that the DLC is a collection of bedwetters unwilling to change the sheets they've pissed, and that the corporate whores on K St who're pimping Left are pimps nonetheless. A fight for the soul of the Democratic Party? Why the eff not? It's not like the Republicans are going to listen to what a unified Democratic Party would say now anyway.

But I also think there are honorable differences between honorable people, and people who are crying that the Democrats are either incapable or unwilling to settle around a smug, self-serving, trite and insulting slogan - like, oh, dWarf's "Stay the course" - are striving to develop just that philosophy of reduction we proclaim to abhor in Republicans. We ridicule those who see the world in black and white, justifiably, correctly. It's Manichean worldviews and impulses to simplicity that's gotten us into such complicated problems. Simplicity isn't going to get us out of them. Debate is exactly what we need.