Occasionally I worry

On general principles - that knowledge and insight are dispersed widely, that any organization large enough to be a coalition of interests is bound to make compromises against what's right for the benefit of what's possible, to name two - blind orthodoxy is almost always wrong. When you see Republicans who routinely passed debt limit increases under Duhbya hold the nation's credit-worthiness hostage under President Obama, you know they're rank hypocrites whose principle is not knowledge much less wisdom, but instead only what power they can derive from a political position.

How then can I claim that the Democratic Party and its interest groups are consistently right on every issue?

I can answer this question in three ways:

1. The Democratic Party is not consistently right on every issue. In fact, it's often badly wrong and compromised not just for practical gain but also morally. The Democrats are in bed with corporate lobbyists and the wealthy, just as the Republicans are. The difference is one of degree - Dems are bad, Repubs are actively evil.
2. The Democratic Party is in fact not liberal enough, and I've criticized it many times on that score.*
3. Democratic policies, politicians, and interest groups are reasonably often wrong. Republicans are decisively wrong in their platform. Democrats, like all humans, are subject to excess both personal and political.

To illustrate answer 3, I give you this municipal labor union overreach.

“It is commonplace, if you are a resident of the city of Chicago, to see work crews on which only a couple of people are working and others appear to be standing or sitting idle,” Mr. Ferguson said last week. “The remarkable thing about this is they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. We have basically codified wasteful overstaffing.”

The purpose of labor unions is to gain a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, not to featherbed. Detailing five guys to walk along behind an asphalt paving machine with hand tools is a day's pay for a smelly stroll. I've heard conservatives use the phrase "unsustainable model" about all labor work rules, but that phrase surely applies to this.

Of course, it's a Democrat who's trying to reform his fellow Democrats.

* A second introspective question: Given answer 2, how do I differ from conservatives who said that Duhbya's greatest fault was his lack of sufficiently extreme conservatism?

Those teabaggers who started during the 2008 campaign to disclaim Duhbya on grounds that he was a moderate (oh, what bullshit) only did it when he was no longer useful to them, when they were facing loss of the government. I've been criticizing President Obama right along. Sure, I was euphoric that he had been elected, but I had believed him to be the least liberal candidate in the Democratic primaries, and I think events since his election - particularly putting Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of economic policy - have proven Obama to be a tepid centrist.

Conservatives march in lockstep when they hold power. Democrats and liberals debate, dissent, and compromise.

Rahm to Rush

Rahm Emanuel smears a pile of Rush Limbaugh all over the Republican Party. It's guilt by (long and slobbering) association, and Rush is the guilt!

How's it feel, Rushbo, to know that Rahm thinks you're so despised by most Americans that he's going negative on your corpulent ass by making the simple, incontrovertible observation that you're the voice of the Republican Party? Care to run for office? We Democrats would love that.

Update: Here's good stuff on mocking the Republican rump of wingnuts. The 'nuts lack enough perspective to grasp that we're enjoying this. They rationalize that we must be afraid. Tain't so.

Update: This is lots of fun! Michael Steele says that he runs the Republican Party, not Rush. Rush, never one to keep his ego in check (nor his appetites), disagrees. Thanks, guys! Keep this story going for a few more news cycles. Let's see, how can Rahm pour more gasoline on this Republican funeral pyre?

My dream: Rush applies the charter of his day job to this hissing match and starts to sidle up to the line that it's his job to stretch - the line that separates racists from the rest of us. If Rush would just let slip that Steele is an affirmative action hiring, the ensuing shit-fight would be sweet to watch.

Confidential internal RNC memo

Title: "No honeymoon for Obama"

Whether there's a similar memo or not, the RNC has already exposed its immediate goal. Hint: It's not to help the country with its economic crisis.

The RNC's immediate goal is, as it always is, purely political. They want to pin the Democrats down under a hail of sniper fire, to keep them from doing what they were elected to do.

Just ask yourself: When those yammerheads were in power, how bipartisan were they? I will really be happy when John Boehner can't get anyone in the press to write down, much less print, his oily, insincere, bullshit quotes.

At every step, the Democrats will be more bipartisan, though the word bipartisan no longer means including the other party's backstabbers, say, Joe Lieberman or Zell Miller.