"Any progressive who thinks it doesn't matter much whether the House speaker is Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner is seriously mistaken."

Absolutely.

VOTE!

"Recall the plot of Saramago's Seeing, in which voters massively refuse to vote and cast invalid ballots, throwing the entire political establishment (the ruling bloc and the opposition) into panic: this act put them in a situation of radical responsibility towards their subject. Such an act is subtraction at its purest: a mere gesture of withdrawing from participation in a legitimizing ritual makes state power appear as if suspended in the air above the precipice. Their acts no longer covered by democratic legitimization, those in power are all of a sudden deprived of the option of replying to the protestors "Who are you to criticize us? We are an elected government, we can do what we want! Lacking legitimacy, they have to earn it the hard way, by their deeds."
-Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

ie: voting only legitimizes an illegitimate system

If ever there was a time to not vote, this is it, damn the consequences.

(And no, I'm not a GOP operative, just a very pissed off progressive.)

Obummer IS sneak Bush's Third TERM.

The Greens have a long way to go to become a viable party in the U.S. . . .

Unfortunate but true.

I spend 4-5 hours per day reading political news and analysis and have written the Obama campaign and DNC numerous times. Nothing changes. We have had a silent president since he won the election. The GOPpers have slapped him and his congress around over and over yet no lesson has been learned. Doing good does not translate into doing well by itself. Especially when the biggest megaphone on the block is owned by Murdock whose sole goal is greed, a compatible inherent republican value.

On Terrorism and civil liberties issues, Michael Hayden resides very close to the furthest-right pole even when compared to other Bush/Cheney officials. He ran the NSA when Bush's illegal eavesdropping program was implemented (and was one of its principal defenders), and just last month defended Bush's torture program in a debate alongside torture apologist Marc Thiessen. Indeed, in 2006, then-Senator Obama voted against Hayden's confirmation as CIA Director, citing his responsibility for the illegal NSA program.

Yet here is Hayden praising Obama's Terrorism and national security policies on the ground that "there's been a powerful continuity between the 43rd and the 44th president."

www.salon.com / news / opinion / glenn_greenwald / 2010 / 10 / 11 / continuity / index.html

Get out and spank the tea party. They're already counting chickens before they've hatched. But these corporate-funded extremists may be in for some surprises.

"Any progressive who thinks it doesn't matter much whether the House speaker is Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner is seriously mistaken."

Might one suppose that yet another hate Iran resolution, one authored by AIPAC, is introduced in the House. You're actually suggesting that it would receive meaningfully different treatment from Pelosi and Boehner?

Your error is that you presuppose that the "convictions" of these scum are not first determined by their relations with their contributors. To imagine the political environment without this underlying taint is to live in a world of adolescent reveries. Political parties and elections in the United States are an utter irrelevance. Attain to a new maturity and stay home in November. Either that or help organize a general strike.

"Political parties and elections in the United States are an utter irrelevance."

Utter BS.

"Not voting, by contrast, is just purely defeatist and cynical. Without a viable political party, progressives can achieve essentially NOTHING in this country."

Au contraire. Actively not-voting, or voting for a third party, or writing in "none of the above" on the ballot, are all very liberating strategies -- it says you refuse to play your assigned role in a thoroughly debased system. If enough people do it, and make known what they're doing, the system loses its fig-leaf of legitimacy.

"Political parties and elections in the United States are an utter irrelevance. Attain to a new maturity and stay home in November. Either that or help organize a general strike."

General strike... Now there's a great idea!

(And yes, staying home in November too.)

Please disabuse yourself of the notion that Obama and his administration are even remotely progressive. He is getting the policies through that he wants but contemporary neo-liberal politics require that he appear disappointed to separate himself from the R's. The Blue dogs and R's are simply providing political cover for his desired outcomes. His only hope of being re-elected in 2012 is to have a Republican Congress to run against. R's and D's agree on how the country should be governe; their only disagreement is about who should do the governing.

"The Blue dogs and R's are simply providing political cover for his desired outcomes."

Does anyone actually believe such shit? If so, you live in an ideological la-la land akin to that of Faux News.

"Protect the wealthiest 2% while the general population sinks into poverty?"

Actually, Obama is against the W tax cuts for the super-wealthy, the Citizens United case, and efforts to gut Social Security, the minimum wage, and anything else that would harm the middle and lower classes.

I certainly don't envy Obama his position. Not only is he constantly attacked from the right for being a "socialist" (and so on) but he is constantly attacked from the left for being too conservative.

Much of the left fails to see the forest for the trees.

"This will open the door for a true progressive Democratic Presidential Candidate, like Dennis Kucinich or Howard Dean."

Where do you people come up with these fantasies?

Do you ever get out? Ever look around?

I've often been disappointed or perplexed by the Dems over the past two years. But of course the Dems are not a single thing--instead, they're a spectrum that runs from, say, Kucinich/Feingold to Lincoln/Nelson. There still remains a strong area of overlap between my progressive values and much of what the Dems are doing or trying to do, at least on the Kucinich/Feingold end.

By contrast, there is no area of overlap whatsoever between my values and those of the GOP. The GOP starts to the right of Lincoln/Nelson and now extends all the way to the absolute lunatic fringe of Angle/O'Donnell.

That's why I'm still working hard to elect Dems. The long-term goal has to be to move the Dems (and the country as a whole) more toward the left end of their spectrum.

Let's not lose sight of Mr. Solomon's point: "Any progressive who thinks it doesn't matter much whether the House speaker is Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner is seriously mistaken."

"This will open the door for a true progressive Democratic Presidential Candidate, like Dennis Kucinich or Howard Dean."

What would be the point?

Even if someone like that could get into power, the moment the person had to make tough decisions, necessary compromises, and factor in reelection, you dreamers and purists would just ignore everything good he was doing and stab him in the f*cking back.

No, the losers will be all of us if the GOP gains control of the government again.

Sitting out and letting the tea party candidates take over is for chumps. Progressives need to get tougher.

Also: "progressives" need to realize they constitute only a very small (albeit quite vocal) minority of the Democratic base. We need to align with Democrats of all sorts in order to have any representation in this country at all. But consensus and compromise, both fundamental in a democracy, aren't exactly the far left's strong suit . . . That's something to work on, with a focus on long-term goals. Pouting and posturing are no way to get there.

Instead of attacking Obama, focus on your true enemies for a change: the 5 right wingers on SCOTUS, the entire GOP establishment, the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch's disinformation empire, radical libertarians, the out-of-control military-industrial complex, etc.

Solomon makes it quite clear that he supports voting for Democrats.

People who expect a perfect world can be their own worst enemies . . .

There's no time for sulking. We gotta win this thing.

Learn something from the far right. When it got clobbered in 2006 and 2008, it organized and came roaring back with this tea party BS.

That's the way you do it. And we should be able to crush them because there are more of us. It's only lack of initiative, will, and organization that prevents the downtrodden from keeping this country out of the hands of the corporate tyrants.

A good article by Cynthia Tucker agrees with your assessment, 18:39.

Excerpt:

"The president has made some of his biggest mistakes trying to woo a GOP opposition that has committed itself to frustrating him at every turn. If he had ignored recalcitrant Republicans, for example, his health care legislation might have become law without months of damaging political drama."

Also, an important quote:

"'I think the Republicans have been diabolically clever about how they’ve portrayed this,' Axelrod conceded. 'They stood on the sidelines and made a decision that 'we’re going to let him wrestle with this mess that we created. And then in two years we can try and hang him with it.'"

Conclusion:

"But the expected Republican gains in the coming mid-term elections may solve one of Obama’s problems: his misplaced faith in logic, persuasion and cooperation in the national interest. Tea-party-fueled anger has produced a wave of GOP candidates for whom the word 'compromise' is akin to treason. There can be no miscalculation about their intentions."

Full article:

blogs.ajc.com/cynthia-tucker/2010/10/15/obama-tried-too-hard-to-work-with-republicans/?cxntfid=blogs_cynthia_tucker

Contrary to what many centrist and DLC-style Democrats think, liberals (or progressives) ARE the base of the Democratic party, not some small (far-left) fringe of the party.

Like many liberals, I am done with this dishonest, pro-corporate DLC / Blue Dog con artist.

HOWEVER, we must vote. We must do so intelligently and selectively.
First, this is a redistricting year, so we need to vote Democratic across the board for state legislators and governors.
Second, with the House and Senate races, we need to vote for the liberal candidates, and the center-left ones, but not for the DLC types, and absolutely not for the Blue Dogs.

If we are ever to take back the Democratic Party, we need to get rid of the Blue Dogs. They are not Democrats. They are Republicans with a "D" next to their names.

As for President Obama's re-election, as the New Yorkers might say, forgetaboutit!!

Self-described "social liberals" constitute about 50% of the Democratic base. The issue of whether those people are the same as "progressives" can quickly get one into a semantic bog. Sometimes "progressive" is a cowardly rebranding of "liberal," sometimes it's merely a synonym, and sometimes it's used to describe the "far left" or "New Left" or "neo-Marxism" or any anti-establishment point of view, in contradistinction to classical liberalism (free market, utilitarian).

Regardless, in order to win actual elections in this country, liberals need to be allied with centrist and conservative Democrats and with a healthy percentage of "independents." That's just the numbers game of democracy.

The current election is a difficult one less because of the much-touted "gap in enthusiasm" between party supporters and more because the large block of independents is breaking for Republican candidates by a margin of about 5 to 3.