It's Hard to be a Democrat (Nora Ephron)

Nora Ephron
It's Hard to be a Democrat
Posted November 5, 2007 | 09:58 AM (EST)

It's hard to be a Democrat, don't you think? There's no alternative, of course, but it's hard. Someone asked me the other day to write something about why I was a Democrat, and I had no trouble making a list of 10 reasons. Of course, five of those reasons were the Supreme Court, and the other five were more or less historical -- reasons like FDR, which is not meant to mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt exactly but some fantasy blob of Democratic values that are a distant racial memory.

But it's hard. It's especially hard to remember that the real enemies are the Republicans, when the Democrats tend to break your heart and the Republicans are just the boys you'd never go out with anyway.

It's hard when you watch a debate and decide that in the end you're probably going to throw your vote away in the primary and vote for someone who doesn't have a chance, like Dennis Kucinich. I mean, look at them, look at the front runners: Hillary Clinton, who can't help being Hillary Clinton; Barack Obama, who was a disappointment from the beginning and whose new-found attack mode is as dispiriting as his low energy level used to be; John Edwards, whom I am afraid I will never be able to think of again (after this week's Peggy Noonan column in the Wall Street Journal) as anything but a desperate furry little woodland animal.

And then there are the Democrats in the Congress. What a bunch of losers, hiding behind the fact that it takes 60 votes to override a presidential veto. So what? So pass a law and make Bush veto it. Make him veto something every single day. Drive the guy crazy. What have you got to lose? And meanwhile what have you done? You've voted for the surge, you've voted to authorize a war against Iran, and you're about to vote in favor of an attorney general-designate who refuses to call waterboarding torture.

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more at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/its-hard-to-be-a-democra_b_71142.html

It's one thing to be the complainer but when you can't EVER seem to do anything else- it becomes clear that some pundits just enjoy getting invited to all the right parties.

... she's forgetting, when she writes about rejecting Mukasey and anybody else Bush sends them, that Bush'll just make a recess appointment.

I like the idea of driving Bush crazy by sending him bills to veto every single day, so he'll look like the bad guy and Dems will at least look like they're trying to at least do something obstreperous.

How many Democrats would it take to stay so that recess appointments can't be made? They could rotate throughout the recess period. All it takes is a belief that what you do is important enough to sacrifice for a short time. But, unfortunately, vacation is more important than blocking Bush's excesses. You get the impression the elected representatives just don't care what Bush does, that it somehow doesn't really matter or affect them directly so why should they expend the effort or give a shit.

So because we don't want Bush to put a torture enabler in on a recess appointment, we'll vote for a torture enabler?

Why give it legitimacy?

You have to say NO to that. You cannot legitimize and legalize what Bush is doing. this vote does that.

Democratic politicians don't "break my heart". Unfortunately, they live up to my expectations of them.

*sigh*