Shut up, okay? Just shut up.
Once again, the Chamberlain wing of the Democratic Party has pulled a recipe for appeasing yourself to better fitness out of their ass and is waving it around, trying to bully the Democratic Party into becoming more like the Evil Party as a recipe for enduring electoral success.
Yes, I said electoral success; apparently the last dozen times that the Stupid Party has done this sort of craven capitulation to the Evil Party has not convinced the idiot "centrists" that selling out your principles in an attempt to woo the damned is not likely to succeed. Good liberals have asked Evil Party supporters what the Stupid Party would have to do to win their votes, and the universal answer appears to be "Become a clone of the Evil Party and we might consider it. Oh, and a few show trials and purges would be nice, too, so can you put that in the evening's entertainment?"
Now that's a compelling argument right there. But instead of pointing and laughing at the pathetic Evil Party followers, the appeasement wing says "they're right! The Democrats can't win because we're too liberal!" and drags out their usual crop of arguments about why it's a good idea to jettison minorities, gay people, poor people, then environment, essential civil liberties, and the belief in a well-run government. And then another 2-5% of the Democratic Party silently slices itself off and tacks off in another direction.
Remember that the Democratic candidate actually won the presidential election (both electoral and popular vote. The coup that installed Maximum Leader Genius doesn't change that) in 2000. But by the time 2004 came around, the Democratic candidate lost the popular vote by between 2 and 3 million people (I'm going to be charitable and assume that a million of those votes were because of vote fraud) and didn't even bother to contest the 10,000 lucky coincidences that happened in the Evil Party clown car of corruption that is the state of Ohio.
Now, nowhere in there did I see the Stupid Party becoming any more liberal. I did see them cravenly voting for the Evil Party tax cuts (which converted -- overnight -- the Clinton era tax surpluses to the current US$400-500 billion dollars a year deficits), the unprovoked aggressive war against Iraq (and we know how much of a success that has been), and don't forget rolling over and approving the crop of completely unqualified partisan hacks that the Evil Party has been packing the US court system with.
The Evil Party followers have noticed this, of course, so that's why they're calling for purges before the Democratic Party can be considered to be a contender for their pathetic votes. I will point out that none of these Evil Party followers would ever turn coat against Uncle Sugar (praise him from which all corporate welfare flows!), so any comment that I might make about the futility of these purges is meaningless, but a party that won't even expel, with force and malice, a human scum like Zell Miller from the party rolls is not a party that's going to successfully expel such (snicker) liberals such as Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton from the party.
I'm a Socialist; my only affiliation with the Democratic Party these days is that they're not likely to wreck the United States (a wreck which, even if I do manage to convince my family that we need to GET THE FUCK OUT OF DODGE and move to someplace where torture isn't a government policy!, would put a pretty severe crimp in my plans to live to a ripe old age and leave a handsome estate to my children), and every time the Chamberlain branch of the party is able to produce a piece of crap that calls for appeasement, appeasment, appeasement, and more appeasement, my connections with the Democratic Party become more tenuous. The appeasement branch of the party is a bunch of losers; why should I spend my money paying for high-priced consultants who will lose?
No, no, that's not my plan at all. 2006 is coming up really soon now, and the Democratic Party has the ongoing war crimes in Iraq, the ongoing torture atrocities, the ongoing looting of the treasury, and the clown car wreck which is the ongoing series of investigations of Evil Party malfeasance. If the appeasement branch of the Democratic Party can be made to STFU and let the adults run the next set of campaigns, it's possible that the ongoing collapse of the Democratic Party might be arrested by winning back a majority in the House and/or the Senate. And once they've done that, well, then it's possible that they'll deserve my campaign and electoral contributions again.
But not now. So just shut up about which liberal group the third way idiots want to sell out today, and try actually winning an election for a change.
(Rox Populi refereed the latest round of dumping chum into the Evil Party waters, with the expected results.)