Losing by Marquess of Queensbury Rules in a Street Fighter World
They don't get football, basketball and forget about ice hockey...
The problem with Progressives is that they keep trying to fight fair with opponents unconstrained by the rules. They never learned how to play team sports. They take pounding after pounding, round after round, when a little sand in the eyes and a kick to their opponents' softer parts would have won the good fight. They stink at football, basketball and forget about hockey. It's not on their agenda.
If they don't like the way things are going, they throw up their tennis racket and storm off the court. And they whine when treated just that way...
And speaking of whining, let's quit whining about what our Leadership hasn't done and celebrate today's victories.
The veil of secrecy has been removed from the Scooter Libby debacle. It is not happy, but it is exposed in the bright sunlight.
The lid is off on Iraq and Iran forever changing the sensibilities of the American public. Sometimes people we trust (or elect) do very bad things for reasons that we cannot fathom.
The wholesale hijacking of the Justice Department is being stopped in its tracks, not to mention the reinvestigation into the stealing of an important election, for President as I recall, that was stolen in '04.
Now grip the unpleasant reality: we do not yet have the votes, we do not have yet the votes, we do not yet have the votes....
The House vote yesterday on troop withdrawal was a major landmark. It is a beginning.
So what do we do?
We don't abandon our own Leadership when they have just started to win back lost ground.
We make strategic and tactical attacks, gain ground, and keep chipping away toward the end goals.
This is essentially what Speaker Pelosi is doing. Check it out.
She is leading a team strategy from a carefully crafted playbook. Get a tutorial on team sports and insight into the real playbook for success. Let's keep the hysterics off the tennis court of our politics.
We do not pull tantrums. We do not abandon the base. We do not take our toys and go home. We stay in the fight and work for the long term.
Matt Stoller, Dave Johnson and Rob Shapiro have all written about the need for long term infrastructure to support this Party: think tanks, strategists, writers, bloggers, and a long term playbook. In fact, maybe the playbook is a 20 year plan....
Help Speaker Pelosi, not be issuing ultimatums, but rather by embracing the first installment of this playbook and understanding the realities of the day-to-day work of healing and rebuilding this country.
It's a tough job, but we are all in this together.