I was really sad when I read Jonathan Chait's latest slam while guesting on Talkingpointsmemo.com. I am addressing him below:
Dear Mr. Chait:
Thank you for criticizing Lieberman. However, I think you need to embrace your inner liberal instead of sideswiping it with comments about 'suicidal purity' and skanking yourself against Dean supporters.
What you must understand about the internet liberal bloggers is that they are people freed from the psychic pain of crippling self-negation.
Political self-negation in the service of feeling socially comfortable in your personal and professional life, we feel, is something Democratic moderates like Beinart fetishize, like seeing their mother naked, or something.
Well, we are your mother naked, standing before you, saying "See? I have tits just like that nice girl you're dating". Aesthetically and viscerally frightening, yet we give you life.
Most of these people you speak of are not in the 'profession' of political discourse, but amateur writers who are getting involved reluctantly because they are not seeing themselves represented by the current Democratic worm hole that is confirming torturers without debate, passing bills that benefit predatory junk-mail usurers, silently perpetuating the anti-rational exploitation of terror-fear, and lost the last election because its main guy was so fucking neutered, afraid of offending a fictional swing voter, and afraid to appear too jarring when insisting on the truth in the face of overwhelming arrogance and lies.
Dean would have won because he would have persistently stood up to the stratcom lies. He would have done things like call out Bush on cheating with a device in front of our faces during the debate. It would have generated energy and altered the narrative. Dean would have won. He would have been president. Today.
We are people who are outside of the D.C. social confines so we don't have to face people we fear and envy at St. Albans parents' night or at Balducci's or whatever.
This is the freedom that you are calling 'suicidal purity'.
Asking for political enfranchisement is what the left-bloggers are doing.
And they want to see this enfranchisement on TV, somewhere besides Jon Stewart's fucking SATIRE show. Stewart is saying what we are thinking. Why can't anyone else in the media-plex? It's because they are too busy trying to semantically distance themselves from people who are becoming politically active for the first time.
We are doing this because Beinart & Co. are too busy trying to look tumescent on terror without questioning the pattern of manipulation that is driving the terror-fear. This is what cowardice smells like. Stop trying to appear palatable to your mentors and to people who hate you.
To politically censor yourself in order to kiss the ass of people who are busy shredding your colon in front of TV cameras, over and over and over again, is worse than suicide. It is ritual disembowelment.
Distancing yourself from this thing you called 'suicidal purity' is a hollow trick. I am not a political activist. I have never held a policy job or anything remotely related to politics. I am a marginally employed person concerned about my country, in my bathrobe, sitting at my computer in the middle of the night and I am asking you to Stop It.
Just Stop it.