What really got me going was this book review by Michiko Kakutani of Matt Bai's "The Argument," yet another "exploration" of what's wrong with us Democrats.
Kakutani, not content to review Bai's tome on literary merit, feels free to season her review with her own Dem bashing as such:
In fact, the current race for the White House finds the Democratic Party facing both a deep-seated identity crisis and a Republican Party that, while weakened, still boasts a redoubtable infrastructure buttressed by a daunting message machine.
Oh really?
After spending an afternoon fuming, I sent this letter to the Times:
Yet another tiresome manifesto about why the Democratic Party just can't get its act together. Has Kakutani been in an igloo for the past year? Last November the Dems, with all their "incompetence," managed to zoom past much better-funded GOP opponents to wrest back both houses of Congress and have launched a series of investigations into Republican criminal behavior that have resulted in a slew of resignations. And this is after less than a year in power after being frozen out of leadership positions since 1994.
Yet, the drumbeat from the MSM is wearily similar: the Democrats are totally incompetent and ineffectual. Where is the evidence?
Further, Kakutani throws more logs on the burning myth of Republican formidability, even though in terms of policy and politics, they have shown themselves to be anything but. Has she forgotten the Social Security "reform" fiasco, the Iraq War/invasion/occupation disaster, the terrifying deficits, the erosion of the national infrastructure, the abject failure of no Child Left Behind to improve education, the countless Abramoff-linked corruption scandals?
How come there never seems to be an exploration of the fissures within the GOP, that seem to me to be far more glaring than those within the Democratic Party? Such as: the Chrstian Right/moral values Republicans versus the corporatists and free traders; the ideologues versus the realists on issues like stem cell research and the minimum wage; the laissez faire internationalists versus the racist/nativist Buchananites. Instead, the MSM continues to grind out the "Republican unity" myth.
I could go on but I'm sure I've already blown my 150-word limit. Yet strangely, Kakutani gets to blather all she wants.