Republicans are the enemy; our generals suck. [View all]

[MannyGoldstein]

Last edited Tue Apr 21, 2015, 11:18 PM - Edit history (1)

Abraham Lincoln had a big problem with his generals at the start of the Civil War: they'd win battles, more or less, but wouldn't press their advantage to decimate the retreating enemy and end the conflict.

So Lincoln replaced his generals, one after the other, until he found ones that would fight. Really fight. And the Union was saved.

If you asked Lincoln who the enemy was, he surely would name the Confederacy, not his pusillanimous generals. But he still fired the generals, because he wanted to get the job done. And getting the job done required more than saying the Confederacy was mean. It meant fighting them, and beating them, and generals are the people who lead that effort in modern warfare.

Let's suppose that Lincoln's generals came back to him after each battle boasting of how they began the battle by offering the Confederacy half the territory being fought over, then after negotiations agreed to give 'em three-quarters.

"We kept a quarter! We could have had nothing! Huzzah!"

And what if, after each of these giveaways, his generals' bank accounts suddenly grew by leaps and bounds? I suspect they'd be court-marshalled, not honored.

And this is what we Democrats face today. Our generals are, by-and-large awful at best and likely deeply corrupt. Just look around. Use your eyes and your brains, and see what's happened over the last 30 years. (Spoiler alert for some: we're @#$%ing losing, big time. Huge.)

Some of us Democrats want to give the same generals a few more decades to figure out how to win. I have a different idea, one that seems to discomfort many Democrats: I think we should follow Lincoln's lead, and find people who might get the job done.

No more excusing giveaways to bankers and the rich by saying it could have been worse. No more horrifically cynical wars fed by hundreds of thousands of human lives, and trillions of our dollars.

New generals. New generals. New generals.

Until we get ones that don't suck.