I first read the unambiguous and utterly, gobsmackingly righteous rant of the late Steve Gilliard, entitled "I'm a fighting Liberal", when I was a bit younger and perhaps a bit less cynical.
But I was no more patriotic or full of spit and vinegar when it came to loathing what the modern Republican Party has become over my lifetime, and what that (d)evolving Party has done to my country.
I'd never actually seen, in print, anyone give full voice to the outrage I myself was feeling about what was going on here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Come, let's talk a bit about how a, now more than a decade old, blog post is still as relevant and important as the day it was first posted.
The entire text is still available. I was previously granted permission to use the piece in whole, but you can read that diary HERE or just follow the link and read the whole piece here at the Blogspot.
Steve doesn't lead the reader gently into his core argument about the conservative Republican portion of These United States.
Hell no, he does not. He starts out like this:
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
I'm a fighting liberal
You know, I've studied history, I've read about America and you know something, if it weren't for liberals, we'd be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren't fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.
What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.
Doesn't that sound
just like the Republican Party we face today?
In the decade since Steve first wrote "I'm a fighting liberal", the Republican Party has gone nowhere but straight down, doubling down in most cases, on issues from rape (Todd Akin, need I say more?) to when exactly the Republican Party will finally decide to stop threatening and to actually Impeach President Obama.
Over something so heinous that it must be a High Crime or Misdemeanor of such import that it cries out for Impeachment of the Executive who dared to: sign the PPACA (which did NOT destroy America, btw); exchange a POW held 5 yrs & who possibly said or did things which might be viewed as Anti-american while held prisoner (John McCain, circa 1973).
I'm not saying that each and every single person who is a racist or homophobe or war-monger or hypocritically lying, cheating, fraudster is a Republican. Just that most of those sorts of people are almost, to a (wo)man, Republican by choice. Worst of all, they are publicly proud of the fact that they belong to a political Party whose main core goal of the past five years - when the nation faced the worst economic challenge in 80 years - was to prevent the re-election of the President. Who, coincidentally, happens to be black.
That in the past decade, those self-righteous panderers of nonsense (global climate change is a hoax) and bile (there's legitimate rape and the other kind) have only amped up their poutrage as a response to any and everything this President and the Democrats have said or done.
As I read the Twitter News of the past couple of days, I wondered briefly how Steve would have managed on Twitter. I think he would have been a fucking rock star on Twitter. Because he already talked in 140 character format.
I hope that even if you've read "I'm a fighting liberal" before, you go re-read this iconic screed written fairly early on in the Bush Administration. Even as the Republicans have gotten worse, they've gotten weaker. It's been a long slog, but we are starting to win.
Marriage Equality is on the rise. Cannabis is being legalized and re-thought across the nation. Both of the ill-begun wars of George W Bush are nearly ended, although a US military presence may be harder to end completely; see US bases in Germany, Italy and Japan 69 years after the end of WWII.
We are winning, if slowly.
Be sure to do your own part this year to help upend the political bobbleheads who fully expect the Republican Party to take the Senate and hold the House. It's what happens, historically during this mid-term at the 6 year point in a two term presidency. But it doesn't have to be that way.
As of 2012, of the registered voters across the US, 31% of them are Democratic Party voters and 27% are Republican Party voters.
There are more of us than there are of them.
If Democrats vote this November, they can beat Republicans in almost every state, just based on the numbers of registered voters.
When WE vote, we WIN
.
So, what do YOU think about "I'm a fighting liberal"?
Me, personally, I think we are #StrongerTogether, and intend to keep working to prove it.