Ever notice how often totalitarian Republicans love to use the word "freedom"? Or how fixated on "family values" right-wingers are who can't keep their pants zipped? For some reason these examples come to mind listening to certain people call themselves "progressives" - people for whom the word evidently means obsessively finding fault with everyone so bourgeois as to actually make progress. These folks naturally use the word "progressive" often and emphatically to describe themselves, because one would be tempted to think they were antagonistic to progress if not incessantly told otherwise. So I would like to give these people a chance to tell us all about the amazing progress they've made in contrast to the Obama administration, which they seem to find it better than sex to attack.
Come on, Heroes of the Proletariat, inspire me with all that you've done to create jobs, increase economic equality, and reduce the power of corporations over our republic. Wow me with your heroic tales of the blog posts you've written opining on the inadequacy of what other people are doing for you to change the status quo. Tell me all about your brilliant political strategy - complain until someone changes things for you; repeat ad nauseum until no one will listen to you anymore; and then, having proven yourself weak and incompetent as a citizen, declare that you're fed up with politics and join a third party to formalize your irrelevance.
Oh, but you're "pushing" for progress. Lovely concept, this "pushing" - it doesn't require that you accomplish anything to be self-satisfied, and if nothing comes of it you can just blame the person you're trying to influence for not heeding you. Meanwhile, whatever is accomplished - by other people, of course - can be attributed to the "pressure" you exerted, even if you had spent the entire process insisting you were being ignored. Accountability-free politics: It's got electrolytes!
The road to progressive victory (Hamsher edition)
- Express your opinion.
- ???
- Progress achieved!
Would you like to know what a progressive is? Put on your thinking caps, children - a progressive is someone committed to making progress, not watching other people make it and heckling their efforts. Do you know why people like you are almost never elected? Because a political office would be effectively vacant with you in it - little more than a rhetoric factory. So pack up your progressive-flavored teabagger outrage and direct your efforts to where you're not utterly fucking incompetent - i.e., where you can be of use to someone other than yourself and the Republican Party. Coffee is for closers, but you probably prefer tea anyway.