He has a lot of fucking gall to dismiss an approach that's never been tried in the first place.

I won't go over there but is that where this is from?

And if yes, then "What jumpjet said".

Having spent quite a bit of energy recently trying to persuade the enablers on the Left at a certain website to give up on any sort of dream of reform from within the Party, I can tell you that they are, like Sisyphus, quite resistant to any contemplation of a course of action other than the one that has failed repeatedly. That they should invest their energy in a new method or approach is advice Very Serious People consider immoral, naive, and reprehensible. They perceive themselves to be heroic realists waging a war of attrition in which small incremental changes are the best we can hope for; whereas someone who recognizes the Democratic Party for the failed institution it is sees them as foolish useful idiots for whom no betrayal, no matter how dark, would cause them to halt their perpetual apologetics. And the very predictability of their submissiveness only encourages further mistreatment from the Party. Go ahead! Hit me one more time and I won't vote for you until 6:55. I wish I could agree with you, Lambert, that Dems have been disabused of the notion that the Party has their backs, but I don't think it's true. And unless we find a primary challenger for 2012 or an independent progressive willing to run, there will be no choice other than apathy and indifference, two emotions the duopoly lives to breed.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, though if the "we" already stood outside the Party, I'm not sure why they should have needed more convincing. It's been apparent how utterly useless the Dems are since Clinton's nonsense and Gore's nomination of Holy Joe. The latest refrain about Obama seems to be that he's stupid, but I just don't buy into that. While I never believed that he was playing 11 dimensional chess in order to move the Left's agenda forward, I do think he's figured out how to get re-elected and it involves playing the role of sane mediator to the peanut gallery of crazies who will soon be investigating his ass. He has done everything possible to alienate his base, knowing full well that a challenge from that direction is highly unlikely given the consequences of the Nader campaign. And since the majority of Americans have no faith in the Republicans, they will certainly have grave doubts about putting an undivided government in their hands. I also believe, having fully digested Karp's conspiratorial vision, that the Right will nominate a candidate in 2012 who is truly beholden to the Tea Party and thus unelectable. The Tea Party's purpose is to frighten the Very Serious People into accepting each incremental step toward fascism, like the proverbial frogs made uncomfortable in the boiling pot, but the duopoly has no intention of letting such potentially independent nuttiness get near the reins of power. They will be put in their place in order that calmer heads, the corporate Dems, may manage the consolidation of profit. Looting will continue unabated. Vacation homes in the Caribbean and elsewhere have already been bought should things turn ugly.

...I can't help but think back to The Good Old Clintontime, around the beginning of the '96 Presidential campaign cycle when, after four years of watching the Lefties and Progressives being repeatedly betrayed, shit on, and abused, only to return for more abuse, I couldn't help wondering: just what the hell do the Democrats have to do to them to convince the Lefties to turn their backs and quit wasting their time -- go on TV and give them the finger and tell them to go fuck themselves, right to their faces?

Seems nowadays the Democrats have been doing exactly that -- with Joe Biden's "whiners" crack, then Obama's bitchy interview in Rolling Stone, and now this pompous, arrogant slab of blather... and what's really pathetic is that the Pwogs are still going crawling back to him -- you know, like that classic needy girlfriend who can't bring herself to leave the guy who's treating her like shit.

Obama is just a soldier of kleptocracy. Looking at Obama over the last few years, I am reminded of this passage from A Hitchhiker's Guide

still the greatest excitement of all seemed to be to meet a man with an orange sash round his neck. (An orange sash was what the President of the Galaxy traditionally wore.) It might not even have made much difference to them if they'd known exactly how much power the President of the Galaxy actually wielded: none at all. Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.

I think Barack Obama is amazingly good at his job.