A Rolling Stone Gathers No Mas

Democrats have certainly enabled them over the years and will likely continue to. They are politicians, after all, not comic book superheroes. But there should be no doubt to anyone who isn't wrapped up in immature freshman dorm cynicism, that there is a distinct difference between those who believe in the concept of an imperial presidency and those who are simply weak and corrupt. They both undermine freedom, but the first is many orders of magnitude worse than the second.

Perhaps that's not much to work with, but it's all we've got and in the end there will be no one around to acknowledge the intellectual superiority of those who sat on the sidelines, starry eyed and impotent, railing about third parties and revolution, while the world went to hell. (See: Communist Party, Germany, 1932) But hey, everybody has a right to their own kind of therapy and ineffectual whining is as legitimate as anything else. Whatever gets you through the night.

-Digs

And so begins the dialing-down of expectations. Ladies and gentlemen, the Management wishes to inform you that tonight the role of Mimi will be played by a harbor seal, Rodolfo by a sofa with only small tears in the upholstery, and Musetta by this dented trombone. Meanwhile the fine moral distiction between the Imperial and the Corrupt appears to be a distinction of convenience, since in the very next paragraph it is precisely the weak and corrupt who bear the burden of Hitler.

Most folks who absent themselves from the Process aren't actually sitting on the sidelines. They aren't in the stadium. Not the same league. Not the same sport. Those of us who have tumbled down from the cheap seats to heckle have . . . tumbled down from the cheap seats to heckle. The Donk can't do anything; her influence on "policy" is nil; her Congressional majority goes on and votes for the Dictator anyway. Who's the fuckin' nihilists, here? There are certainly precedents for spending an eternity on a task that will never reach fulfilment, but bending eternally to the receding water or pushing forever at the heavy stone are meant for punishing the wicked dead, not that I necessarily object to watching Good Liberals go heaving boulders up a hill.

It would be one thing to argue that reactionary nut jobs like yours truly are wrong in our diagnoses and prescriptions, but arguing instead that we are impotent sophists, all the while standing atop the vast, steaming pile of Netrootsian inefficaciousness--incapacity being the principle characteristic of blog--now that takes a pair of brass ones, as my grandmother likes to say. The people that Digby et al. claim as representatives of their political aspirations won't do a goddamn thing that Digby et al. request. As for me, I'm proud to be a whiner, and it is the nature of the whiner to be proudly ineffectual. On the other hand, to claim status as an activist while failing in virtually every political endeavor is to put on the clown hat and become purposefully, almost majestically ridiculous.