Excuse me Sadlynoicans, I'll take Paul Greenberg for all the marbles

Since Covad's email system is down from New Jersy to Virginia, I am taking the morning off to really let fly with my true feelings.

Let me open with a quote, from Greenberg's culvert of effluvia:
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Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the Democratic Party. Because if Tuesday's election returns in Connecticut are any indication, it's taking a well-traveled road - right over a cliff.
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I love the Republican't strategy of saying that liberal stances are now far left fringe strategies. This has been working for a long time and been documented by my peers¹ but I still get extremely annoyed by it. This is called transference. You are placing your fears onto another party. The Republican'ts have once again lost the public in a lopsided and foolish crusade against an enemy that didn't really exist before we created it. I am referring to the Clinton impeachment. The only problem is that they have fantastic PR. They emerged from a shit storm of bad press smelling like roses. I am worried they will do this again. If we were to look at comparable poll results for Clinton's impeachment versus Bush's, things look pretty bad.²
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Think about it: The Dems now have lost two successive presidential elections, they've been unable to break the GOP's hold on Congress that dates back to the watershed congressional elections of 1994, and now they've managed to defeat . . . Joe Lieberman.
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I don't want to sound too crazy, but both of those Presidential elections were quite suspect. The 2004 election just shifted the majority of fraud from Florida to Ohio. The list goes on and on and on. These allegations all sicken me because any subversion of the voting process is a blatant disregard for our history and our founding principles as a nation.

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But even if he wins, the Democratic Party will have lost its last honest-to-goodness Harry Truman/John F. Kennedy/Scoop Jackson figure. Which would be a pity - and a bad sign for the future. Because when the party loses touch with the peace-through-strength strain of its history, it loses touch with a lot of voters.
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I'll take the last part first. "Peace through strength" is fine. Peace through bombing the fuck out of all the brown people in the world and immolating our military in a senseless conflict is our current strategy and it is not working. The voters in Connecticut have declared that they are tired of this strategy and blanket support of the President's murderous policies. A desire to withdraw from the foolish and insane war in Iraq does not mean that we are soft on defense. It means exactly the opposite. The National Guard units will be brought home to do exactly what their name implies. Guard the Nation.

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Talk abut retro, it's hard to read the news today without feeling intimations of the 1930s.
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I agree with this statement but not with his sentiment. It is indeed hard to read the news without being reminded of the incidents in the 1930s and 1940s. The loonies calling for the genocidal nuking of Iran or Bill O'Reilly advocating Saddam style government.

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Ned Lamont, now the official Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut, reminds editor Peretz of the fatal charm George McGovern exerted over his party back in 1972, when another divisive war was raging in Vietnam.
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You opened the door and I am now inviting in the ghosts of those incidents. McGovern was ratfucked out of the election by another group of people committed to election fraud. The times they aren't a changing. Is Greenberg suggesting Lamont is going to be ratfucked by the Connecticut GOP? Maybe not, but I wouldn't be surprised if that did happen. For more information, check out the book and movie version of All the President's Men. However, I will be accurate and say that I seriously doubt Greenberg would have anything to do with that beyond making crap up on his website. Oh and about Vietnam? That was a bad idea then and a great analogy now.
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Well, we'll see. There are no sure things in politics. But it's clear to some of us that Lamontism is just McGovernism redux. Call it the New Isolationism. It might even be successful at the polls this time out. The old one was - till Dec. 7, 1941. Still, I can't think of a better way to enhance Republican chances in 2008 than to remodel the Democratic Party in the image of George McGovern. (Think how well a McCain-Giuliani ticket might do against a Ned Lamont type atop the Democratic ticket.)
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Isolationist? I guess Greenberg hasn't read Lamont's website:
At this critical time in the Middle East, I believe that when Israel’s security is threatened, the United States must unambiguously stand with our ally to be sure that it is safe and secure. On this principle, Americans are united.

That just upgraded Greenberg from cobag to chunderloaf eating gruntmuffin.³

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Let's hope it doesn't come to that. Because what's bad for the Democratic Party has a way of being bad for the country. When one of the two parties in a two-party system gets taken over by its True Believers, the balance that the system is supposed to provide is threatened. Which is why now is the time for all good men - and women - to come to the aid of the party.
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I almost spit my drink all over my desk. If we take this entire paragraph out of its context, Greenberg is totally right. When the Democratic Party was kicked to the curb in 2000, our country went to shit. Further back, when the religious talibangelicals⁴ took over the Republican't Party, the balance in the system was ruined. Now our entire system of checks and balances is under assault. All good people should rush to the defense of the Democratic Party and vote for more people like Lamont and get our country back on a balanced walk of progress, instead of this danse macabre.

Greenberg ends his column with an extremely dignified cheap shot at Representative McKinney of Georgia, the Republican'ts' favorite punching bag. After all, she's black, female and pissed off at Bush. What don't they like about her?

¹ By peers, I really mean those bloggers and writers who posses skills far superior to mine.
² I don't know much about the quality of either poll and I encourage my reader to investigate it. Ipsos' web site, whose poll was cited by AfterDowningStreet.
³ I like gruntmuffin. I just invented it. Well, not completely, Pinko Punko gets the credit for the muffin part. But the grunt is all mine.
⁴ Clif's word. I love it. How does he get his site to the top of the Google search?