Pundit Country

“I don’t want a national healthcare system or a balanced budget. I’m a Democrat. I demand them!”

-James D. Langston, Highline substitute teacher and proud delegate for the WA State 33rd District Democrats

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

-Martin Luther King, Letters from a Birmingham Jail

While MLK was not talking to the issue of full health care rights for women (including abortion) or to the LGBT movement, his words hold resonance for both. Waiting patiently by the sidelines and allowing the political elites of this country to determine the timeline to do the right thing will only guarantee that it will never happen. Whether it be healthcare, DADT, DOMA, or a fair health care system for all, it’s constant, unyielding pressure from the grassroots that forces change. Just something to keep in mind as we enter the political season of 2010.

What we are witnessing right now is an anti-Christian programmatic pogrom. What is a ‘pogrom’ it’s the word that describes anti-Jewish raids by Cossacks and others in czarist Russia, but a programmatic pogrom best describes what is happening right now. These are not isolated attacks. And while we no longer have Cossacks to threaten, we now have left-wing bloggers who actually call themselves Kossacks.

-Ken Blackwell, former Republican Secretary of State for Ohio in an opinion piece for FOX News.

Sir, I realize FOX distorts the news but I don’t think even they can manufacture a mass murder in America’s streets and they be the only ones who notice. I would suggest locating a dictionary ASAP. That word (pogrom) doesn’t mean what you think it means. Also, Christians are not an ethnic group.

“[The New York Times reports that Glenn Beck, in his closing speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference described “progressivism” as a cancer, “the disease in America.” Let there be no doubt that this is nothing more than the stench of fascism, which relies on treating one’s political opponents as what Carl Schmitt, the great (I use that word advisedly) Weimar political theorist (who ended up supporting Hitler’s takeover in 1933), termed “enemies” who were viewed ultimately as subhuman (as “cancers” are), ulutimately fit to be eradicated “by any means necessary….

It is past time for Republicans to be called on whether or not they tolerate millions of their fellow citizens being called “cancers” and “diseases.” We are indeed in a true moment of cultural and political warfare, in which Glenn Beck has made very clear that he has no regard whatsoever for the most basic notions of civility (which begin by granting the possibility that one’s opponents simply disagree rather than are “cancers” to be ripped out of the body politic).

What “Beckism” presages is more terrorist violence like that conducted in Austin, Texas, where a demented citizen flew into an IRS building and killed a true American “hero” a/k/a known as a public servant who had dedicated his life to tax collection. One might remember that Justice Holmes called taxes “the price we pay for civilization.” Part of our move toward fascism is to view as “heroes” only those who carry guns and are prepared to risk their lives while preparing to inflict fatal violence on others. We must recognize that all public servants are, in their own ways, “heroes.” The Republican Party for the past generation has systematically viewed all public servants, save for the military, as chumps, who if they had any real talent, would be working in the private sector (perhaps in Goldman Sachs, etc.). I truly fear for our country.”

-UT Law Professor Sandy Levinson (h/t Open Left)

“Yeah, I will always have an asterisk after my name, but I hope I’ll have two asterisks: one is ‘they impeached him,’ and the other is ‘He stood up to them and beat them. And he beat them like a yard dog.’”

-former President Bill Clinton, during an interview for Ken Gormley’s new book The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr.