Democrats Don't Sabotage Other Democrats When the Stakes are This High and the Enemy is That Low.
The main problem is staring us in the face and the stink can't be ignored. It's going to take all of us working together--with the Democrats. No getting around it.
We’re in the darkest of times right now. It’s no longer ‘maybe’. And we know the cause. Republicans and the Right Wing are the cause; Donald Trump is the effect. Every time we think it couldn’t get any worse, it gets worse. But who gets the most blame? The Democrats. The eternal scapegoats. Those folks who SHOULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING!
Yes. They should have.
Let’s get this straight: there are no perfect politicians. FDR shouldn’t have approved concentration camps for Japanese citizens. HST shouldn’t have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. JFK shouldn’t have waited so long to get on the Civil Rights train. Barack Obama should have been more leader and less placater.
I’m willing to throw the blame around, and I’m a tried-and-true Democrat. I have been since at least 1949, when I was 12 years old sitting in someone’s living room screaming cheers at the radio as it announced the victory of Harry S Truman, the man nobody in their right mind thought could ever win the actual presidency.
There are some of you who think it’s absolute nonsense to be that blindly partisan, but I have always known I’d be in it for the long haul. I couldn’t be anything but a Democrat. Apparently, I was born to it and it stuck. Still, I’m not blind to the Democrats’ faults and I often say so. When I call out the Dems it’s because I want us to win, not lose. I want us to be successful in this fight for democracy. I want the Democrats to know I appreciate their efforts, but at the same time, when I see problems they might be able to fix, I want them to listen to me.
The last thing I want to do is undermine their efforts by insulting them, by insisting they’re worthless because they haven’t been able to put a stop to the Trump regime. The Democrats are all there is between us and total devastation.
I’m happy to be a member of the Democratic Party and I have no problem defending them against the stilly stuff, the calls to do this that and the other thing whenever the bad guys surface again and refuse to play by the rules.
My hackles rise as proud non-Dems or pseudo-Dems like James Carville and Steve Schmidt and Rahm Emmanuel and Andrew Cuomo find their happy place in front of the cameras by going after my party, as if we aren’t the better party, as if we have no leaders who understand our needs as well as they do, as if NO Democrat is doing anything. Those guys must know by now that they’re doing the Republicans’ work for them.
When former Fox anchor Megyn Kelly thanks them for their contributions, when Donald Trump repeats their words against us, when the press uses their words as proof that ‘the Democrats are in disarray’, it should be a signal that they need to shut the hell up. They’re not helping.
So how do we Democrats who aren’t in government positions help our party? We can do it sticking with our party, by building a strong membership, by supporting our local candidates, by remembering who we are meant to be. We’re the good guys.
Should we criticize? Of course we should. The Democrats have fumbled when they should be in the lead. How can the good guys be so far behind in the polls? I’ll be the first to admit they’ve strayed far from their promises to see the light and make things right.
I want the Democrats to be all heart and all courage. I want them to go after the rich and help the poor. I want them to recognize minority rights while at the same time working feverishly toward cheaper health care, higher wages, bodily autonomy, consumer protections, public land protections, excellence in free public education, elder care, and restoring the rule of the land.
I want our system of government to be fair and wise and above all, effective, working toward equity and equality and never forgetting the promise of the common good. I want the Democrats to engage us, rather than to throw promises at us in hopes that we’ll keep on electing them.
I want them to be in control, running things in a way that justifies our confidence in them.
We need more jobs with higher wages, we need lower prices, we need protections at every level. We need to be able to live our lives as citizens in a country that works FOR us and not against us. Only a caring, committed government can do that. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that we are ungoverned at the moment, but that doesn’t mean government can’t work. Our backlash, our resistance, proves we won’t give in quietly, and that we want the best for all of us. That requires good government.
Now we need the Democrats in office to join us. There are signs that more of them are awakening, putting their feet on the ground, but there still aren’t enough of them. Now they need to grab their weapons and stock up on ammunition. They know what to do. It’s in their Party Platform, last updated at their convention in 2024. It’s all spelled out. They need to read it and put it to work.
And we need to encourage them. We need to stop putting them all under one roof and recognize those who are showing definite signs of working for us and against the Trump regime. We need to make our own promises, and one of them should be to throw our support behind those who are putting their careers and often their lives on the line in order to buck the trend toward anti-democratic totalitarianism.
Democracy is our promise, our salvation, and our goal. Nothing should stand in the way of keeping it. I know I’m not telling you anything new. I’m looking for answers, too, and I’m simply asking that you give the Democrats the leeway they’ll need to move us forward.
We can’t abandon them when they are our only chance. With solid support from millions of Americans, with no threat of sabotage, with the promise that if they grow savvy enough and brave enough and bold enough to take the regime on full force, we’ll be behind them, I believe they will build on that energy and find their way.
It’s going to take all of us, not just some of us, to build a force strong enough to vanquish what has become our internal enemy. They are not fooling around. They want to OWN us and everything around us. They want to end any thought of a democratic government and build a regime that is all-controlling and all-consuming. And they want to make it permanent.
We’re past the point of thinking it might happen. It’s happening. We’re past the point of deliberating on the side we’ll take. We’re either with them or we’re with the Democrats. No amount of wishful thinking will make a third choice possible. This is where we are. Either the Democrats win or we’ll all lose.
It’s up to us. It’s always been up to us.
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