The Progressive Crack-up, Cont.
Want to watch the Netroots Left fracture in real time? Do a Google blog search on "Jane Hamsher," then hit the refresh button every hour. Hamsher, the proprietor of the progressive site FireDogLake (and co-producer of Natural Born Killers among other movies) has, according to many prominent liberal bloggers, "jump[ed] the shark," "damage[d] the cause," and "decided that if you can't beat the Teabaggers you might as well break out your own nutsack," all because she has A) determined, like Howard Dean (for a week, anyway), Arianna Huffington, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, that the health care reform bill should be killed, B) called for Rahm Emanuel's resignation, and C) made that case on Fox News, while also making common cause with Grover Norquist.
I am sure there are plenty of personal and professional issues and histories that I'm not aware of, but some of the broad themes on display here are eternal, and affect/afflict even marginal political groupings (*cough*). Is the perfect the enemy of the good? Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Should some people or entities just be declared beyond the pale, off-limits to all right-thinking bipeds? Is Defection just another word for Opportunism? Loyalty for Blindness?
While chewing on those perennials, take a gander at Hamsher's defense of working with Grover Norquist. Sample:
[I]t's not an issue of "personalities." It never should be. It's about principles. And principles aren't pliant — you either have them or you don't. You can't just use them as a yardstick to measure the inadequacy of people you don't like, and then throw them away when it comes to your "friends."
Rahm Emanuel is destroying not only the Democratic majority but the Democratic Party. There isn't enough pork in the world to hold his "Blue Dogs" in office with the legacy of bailouts that he has engineered, and that's why his "big tent" is now collapsing in his wake. […] [T]he corrupt back-room deals, the endless bailouts — belong to Rahm.
The ground is shifting. You can feel it. And the Rahm dead-enders have become no different than the Bush dead-enders, completely unaware that the President whose malfeasance they are defending on the basis that one must not "consort with Republicans" is the one who ran on — consorting with Republicans. It is knee-jerk authoritarianism in the extreme.
I wrote about, and offered some qualified praise for, Obama's lefty critics last week. Nick Gillespie interviewed Grover Norquist for Reason.TV last year.
