Sunday, March 30, 2008

Bad essay. Good comment.

This essay on Alternet is essentially a call to act stupid. It's a dumb idea (filed under "things that want to be contrarian but are just backwards").

This comment, found on the same page (I couldn't find a direct link to the comment), is a much smarter idea, politically speaking:

It would be much more useful and effective, I believe, for the Democrats to pull an entirely different page out of the GOP playbook. Tell the story of giving people back something they regard as wrongfully taken from them and let them dream of how they will make use of that "gift." In the case of the Republicans, the game is played by telling people they can have their tax money back to spend as they please (ignoring the services and devaluation of the currency that results from deficit spending). The GOP has set the table for a whopping round of giving people back their privacy, the security of their identities and private information, the right to be told the truth by a whole range of scientists working the public interest, the right to know what their government is doing on their behalf, and the right to have the government respect their wishes about, say, war or consumer protection even if it is not a presidential election year.


Though, as the commenter notes, Democrats in general have not shown much appetite for challenging a lot of Bush policies. After all, the Dems, as political elites, are the beneficiaries of many of those policies.

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