I'm new here, but it's getting really frustrating watching all the Obama bashing that's going on. It's as if we didn't learn anything from 2000 and what happens when we don't unite behind our candidate.
I know some of these liberal purists. They're my friends. I get their frustration, but I don't sympathize with it. In America we have too many comforts to fool ourselves into believing that we have the right to put our own moral beliefs over what we know deep down is the reality based path to less suffering on this planet. And I also get that morally, they just don't want to have to walk around believing they have blood on their hands via their support of Obama. Well, you know what? We all have blood on our hands in this country. All of us. The only question is how much.
All the Obama bashing by the far left these days is helping me remember why it is that Dem majorities never last, and why they never have the unifying strength to pass our agenda items into law.
Once we win, our memories seem to be so short that we immediately forget all the pain that occurred after the last time liberals chose their personal consciences in the voting booth rather than being reality based.
But from my standpoint, being truly moral means being reality based, and voting to limit the damage. It means not fooling ourselves into focusing on absurd ideas like beating Obama with a primary opponent in 2012, or voting for Nader in 2000. It means throwing your support behind Obama in the last primary instead of wasting it on Kucinich, because if Clinton would have won, it'd have been worse than it is now. That's the truly reality based moral way to approach American politics.
Liberals need to walk a fine line between bashing and criticizing. Right now, what I'm seeing at Huffington Post and here is way over the line.
Sometimes we may even need to hold our tongues and choose politics over doing what we think is moral in the moment. We need to think about what is moral in the long term.
We're all accessories to murder in this country, each in our own way. People who aren't reality based are just as much accessories as those of us who support candidates like Obama that can actually win. But the reality is that when Republicans win because liberals aren't active or they're focused on candidates like Kucinich, then more people die. So in my book, these liberal anti-Obama purists will have more blood on their hands than those of us who will work to keep Obama in office... should he lose in 2012 to any of the Republican candidates now being floated.
And likewise, liberals who don't get off their butts and get active for 2010 will have more blood on their hands as the country gets yanked back to the right under a Republican majority in Congress.
Being moral means being reality based. As citizens of the US, we all have blood on our hands. The only question in the end is whether our political decisions result in a world with more death or less. In 2000 we should have learned that being purists and not being active and motivated behind our candidate... this will only result in more death, and often much more than we allowed ourselves to believe at the time. If people want to honestly say they're reality based, then ideas like giving Obama a primary opponent or voting for candidates like Kucinich or Nader in primaries or general elections... these are paths that lead to more death, not less.
In my opinion, the liberal purist path is much more blood-soaked than the one walked by reality based supporters of Barack Obama. It wasn't the liberals who got active behind Gore in 2000 that need feel especially guilty. It's the liberals who chose to be purists and to follow their own moral code at the expense of living breathing people.
After the administration of GWB we don't have any excuse to not realize the fallout from our purity obsessions on the left. And with candidates like Palin and Thune on the horizon (fueled by guys like Glenn Beck), we have no excuse for not being sufficiently frightened by what could come of liberals not being active supporters of Obama.