Why is Hitchens still published?  His latest in Slate, What I got wrong about Iraq was such a muddled mess, I couldn't figure it out.  Hellblazer had to break it down for me with the short answer:

Nothing. Absolutely Nothing.

I think the plan outlined below is a good model. I'm thinking this sort of thing could be done on a national level. And I think this is what the Dean campaign should morph into.  Whaddya think?

Kerry's 3-point plan to deal with gay marriage issue:

Kinsley in Slate on Democrats trying to think like Republicans

I thought 'red' meant 'lefty' and 'blue' meant 'right wing conservative.'  When did this change?  

I was one of those in 2000 going around urging everyone to vote Nader. I wrote dismissive letters to the editor bashing Gore and the sheep in the Democratic Party.  My favorite line then was Michael Moore's 'Clinton was the best Republican president we ever had.' Well, I was wrong about voting for Nader, although I don't think I was so wrong about the problems with the Democratic Party.  What I was wrong about was the solution.  I thought a third party could be established, not realizing at the time what a pipe dream that is.  Third parties seem only serve to weaken the party in power (Nader in '00 stopped Gore, Perot in '92, stopped Bush, Anderson in '80 stopped Carter, etc.). Bottom line is the US is a two party state.

Aside from the past three years of living hell courtesy of the Bush Administration, the thing that brought me to this realization, or at least helped articulate it, was an interview with Tony Kushner, playwright (Angels in America) published in Heeb Magazine. (Heeb, BTW is a very entertaining pub.--tag line: we're the kids your Rabbi warned you about.)

I was already on board with the Dean campaign for this cycle, with no illusions about his moderate politics (pro-free trade, guns, military, etc.), before I came to the Kushner interview.  In the interview (an excerpt of which I've probably illegally typed and excerpted below) Kushner talks about the need for actual political POWER and political compromise necessary for that power to manifest itself.  I think this is the root of Dean's appeal to me, at least.  The guy is making it happen on the ground--money, volunteers, and a smart message.  He looks like a winner and I can live with the stuff I don't agree with.

This should be required reading for those who dismiss the Democratic Party for being too moderate.

--------------------
begin excerpt from Heeb:

Heeb: For the people who express their rage at American imperialism by throwing paint at Starbucks, if you could go to one of their meetings what would you recommend that they do?

Kushner: I would recommend that they work for the Democratic Party.  That's the hard thing to say right now.   To me, the antithesis of throwing paint at a Starbucks--which is not to say that the Starbucks don't deserve to have paint thrown at them, that what these people are pointing out and what they're accomplishing is not with great value, because it absolutely is--but the fact of the matter is, all of us Americans are caught up in a system of luxury and privilege that's immensely difficult to move beyond, and little gestures of ridding your life of impurities and sins may be refreshing on some level or interesting as a way of experimenting with your life, but these little gestures of personal refusal don't actually alter the structures of power.  The question is, if you believe in the absolute moral necessity of resisting something that you see as profoundly evil, and you're not just playing a game, then what is our best bet for making an alteration?

Heeb: And what do you think the answer is?

Kushner:  I think it's realpolitik.  The principle of realpolitik is that politics isn't an expression of your personal purity.  Politics is about compromise.  People need to come to an understanding right now that politics is very much a matter of the lesser of two evils, or three--however many evils, but you choose the least evil one.  If you don't believe that the lesser of two evils is better than the worse of two evils, you  have only to look at the United States in the last few years.  Al Gore was a horror and the most untalented politician on the national scene in many a year, but if anybody actually thinks that Al Gore would not be an infinite improvement over what we have now ... And people say. "Well, Bill Clinton didn't do this and Bill Clinton didn't do that, and the first Bush passed more money for AIDS research than Bill Clinton." and all this stuff.  These are incredibly easy and oversimplified factoids that we use to remind ourselves that political structures are without meaning.  It's a complete rejection of the possibility of working within democratic structures--which still exist, even though they're in great danger right now--and opting for some refusalism that leads somewhere, but nobody knows where.  

This is a time of incredible crisis, and it seems to me we're not going to get anywhere good for a very long time, but we can try and put the brakes on where we're going now.  I don't know anyone who has paid any attention to history who doesn't say this is absolutely the worst, most dangerous moment the human race has ever faced.  I don't think that is an exaggeration at all.  I think our chances of surviving the 21st century are extremely slim.  And if you believe that, I don't know why we all sort of giggle about the idea that the Democratic Party matters.  Of course that's what going to win the election and take the White House away from George W. Bush.  It isn't going to be the Green Party.  It isn't going to be people with black bandannas over their faces marching down the streets next September blowing up Gaps and Starbucks to show George W. Bush whatever we're trying to show him.  And of COURSE the Democratic Party candidate next fall will be compromised, and of course he'll make mistakes, and of course there'll be lots of advice saying "Don't go too far to the left so you'll sound bad in the debates."  But if people go out and vote for Ralph Nader again, or don't vote ... The fate of the world is in our hands and if we fuck it up, it's our fault.

Heeb: A lot of people don't want to hear that.

Kushner:  I said this in a speech in Providence a couple of months ago and people got really mad at me, but Bush was right:  Those huge anti-war demonstrations on the 15th of February WERE focus groups!  We had no power, so all we could do was let people know what our opinion was.  Well, that's a focus group!  We didn't storm the US Embassy, didn't do anything really illegal or any kind of real civil disobedience, we didn't go march to some airbase and tear it apart.  We got out on the streets and said, "We don't want this war."  And he said, "Thank you for your opinion.  Why should i listen to you?"  It's OUR fault the Democratic party didn't support us. We wrote them a few letters, but nobody on the Left that I know has ever been to a Democratic party meeting, including myself.  We don't even know how the party works!  But demographically it's the party of the people of the United States.  It's ethnically diverse, it's not all rich people, its platform at least is essentially progressive and decent.  It's not anti-capitalist, it's not socialist, but it at least has a sort of Keynesian idea of capitalism that understands the importance of regulation and some sense of equitable taxation, which is the closest we can get right now in real political terms to a redistribution to wealth.  And it's the party that passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and the Great Society and the New Deal.  This is not of interest?  I don't understand that.  I believe in radical democracy. I believe that democracy has much more growing to do and that there are possibly other ways to having a representative government.  But I also believe that there's immense importance in American political traditions, like a centralized federal government that protects minorities from majoritarian tyranny, that we can't just sneer at and turn our back on because we read in A People's History of the United States that Columbus deliberately gave the Native Americans smallpox.  Maybe he did, I don't know.  But that's really not the point right now.  It's not enough to express your outrage at how badly people behave--you also have to get power, and that's what started this whole jeremiad.  

--------end excerpt from Heeb

Please check out Heeb if you can find it.