A stake we can believe in

It may be one of history’s greatest ironies that the president elected as a harbinger of progressive change turns out to be the president who drives the final stake through the heart of the progressive movement.

And it was progressives who are holding the stake for him.

It did not bode well in Denver when Move On and other progressive organizations agreed to not to demonstrate at the Democratic convention. The result was a very polite convention, sponsored, in part, by ATT.

According to Thursday’s New York Time, the coup de grace was delivered when Obama began casting about for a Supreme Court nominee. Liberal and progressive activists were dragged into the Oval Office and told “not to lobby for their favorites in the news media or talk down candidates they opposed. The message, as one surprised visitor heard it, was ‘get on board or get out of the way.’”

It was democracy in action.

And, of course, progressives bowed, scraped and pulled on their collective forelock as they politely complied, and nary was a peep heard out of them.

The left is choking on its politeness. It has reduced itself to a ragged waif hovering outside the corridors of power waiting for the movers and shakers to throw it an occasional scrap of food, which always turns out to be a mud pie.

The movement that once roared with the voices of Eugene V. Debs and John L. Lewis is a hollowed out anemic shell that speaks in hushed tones lest it offends. In its weakness, it has created a vacuum into which Wall Street and our military-industrial complex has poured. It's silence has created an area within which Rush holds forth, unopposed.

It wants nothing to do with the raucous union hall or the angry demonstration: it no longer screams or throws rocks. It has become so enamored of its ideological prissiness that it is afraid to roll up its sleeves and get some dirt under its fingernails. It has turned its back on workers, rednecks and the poor. Instead, it frets about second-hand smoke and teenage pregnancy while the masses that were once its base sink into poverty and despair.

It expostulates when our leaders torture and trash the Constitution instead holding their feet to the fire and demanding the restoration of our nation’s moral compass. And it does so politely.

Silently, they wring their sanitized hands as Obama slowly morphs into a Ronald Reagan with brains.

--Case Wagenvoord