We never will. No one on our side will ever be good enough for them unless they sell their soul to them. I grew up in the Baptist church, so it has been a hard journey for me. I kept trying to see both sides for so long, as it was part of my life and part of my children's life.
They are now trying to run John Edwards' campaign He simply can not let them do it. There is no middle ground on this. Chris at MyDD and other bloggers are saying that this is only the start...to put a wedge between the netroots and the candidates. They will do it to others if they succeed.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/2/7/213425/5224I have spent nearly the last four years of my life working on full-time progressive movement building. I do this because I believe a vibrant, healthy and mature progressive movement is the only way to counter the conservative movement, and to achieve the sort of change I want to see in America. Given this, I would rather find a new line of work than, in a Democratic primary, support a candidate who first courts the progressive movement, and then throws it under the bus at the first sign of pushback from the right-wing. We do everything we can to help Democrats, from raising hundreds of millions of dollars, to fighting every single negative media story, to innovative activism, to generating huge amounts of volunteer hours, to putting up with compromise after weak compromise in D.C. and on and on and on.
If, despite all of our tireless efforts, someone only views loyalty as something that flows uphill and shit as something that flows downhill, then quite frankly I feel supporting that candidate in a primary election would be self-destructive. If one of the main goals of the progressive movement is to help make the Democratic Party more open and accountable to its grassroots supporters, how can we still achieve our goals as a movement by helping someone who doesn't value his grassroots supporters to become the leader of the party? If you give someone your time, energy and support no matter how he treats you, why would that person ever respect you? What reason would he ever have to treat us as anything but an ATM machine? I can't think of a single one.
If you have not seen Alexandra Pelosi's Friends of God Road Trip on HBO, please do this month. It is very clear they are thinking of this in terms of a war.
Joel Osteen, a pastor seen weekly on national TV, says Christians must "fight the good fight." Teenage Christian zealots attend a "training camp" for "young warriors." A man identified as a Christian comic shouts from the stage, "We want our country back, and we'll fight for it" and a solicitation letter from Jerry Falwell is headlined in large italic type, "Will you join me in a declaration of war?"
They call it a culture war, Christians vs. "the secular progressive movement" (a phrase favored by Bill O'Reilly, Fox's nut-in-residence), Christians vs. abortion rights advocates, and Christians vs. science. Ken Ham and Buddy Davis indoctrinate children in the precepts of Creationism, which claims, among other things, that Job (as in the Book of) lived among dinosaurs and that those dinosaurs roamed the earth mere thousands of years ago -- not millions.
They wear t-shirts with Ignite written on them...Ignite what? They jump up and down and cry and yell with their hands in the air. A woman told Pelosi that if she believe in evolution she did not have a good education. They are right, they say dinosaurs roamed the earth with just a few thousand years ago. They are right because God told them so. End of story. No pleasing them from our side. It is almost a closed society unto itself.
Falwell encourages them to make their own "Battle Plans" at My Space at a site called "Battle Cry." Who are they going to battle? Us? The devil?
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/1034We are not going to please them ever...trying to appease is useless. I speak coming out of that evangelical movement. My father was head deacon as I grew up, my whole family was involved. It was tolerant then, it is not tolerant now.