Billmon has the sordid story.

Disgusting, isn’t it? I’ve posted the important details at the top of this blog as the Blue Box message. I think every liberal blogger should put it in their header or sidebar and keep it there till Election Day as a constant reminder.

And call me Mr. Pissy today because I’ve been seeing an awful lot lately that I find truly disgusting. From LINOs and PINOs, those liberals or progressives who resort to the Republican playbook where anything’s okay as long as you win.

I recall how desperately the DNC went after liberal Republican Lowell Weicker. Talk about ‘blowback’; now we’re stuck with Lieberman, New England’s Zell Miller without the meth.

That’s what DLC strategy does. It knocks out one of the few decent Republicans and replaces him with a more conservative guy. I thought the party had wised up since then, but it now appears a lot of Democratic strategists are so tired of losing that they’ve retreated to that Republican lite strategy at the ripest time for a Congressional takeover.

And all throughout the blogosphere, there’s all this hush-shush talk that suggests we can’t discuss this openly or we’ll be the sad little circular firing squad hurting the Democratic chances again.

What a bunch of fucking weasel crap.

I’m a Democrat. I’m an American. I don’t plan to relinquish either label just because someone doesn’t like hearing the reality of how fucked up their logic is. Democrats don’t lose because of internal divisions between liberals and moderates. They lose because too many keep shifting right of center, and showing they care more about election strategy than integrity or maintaining critical Democratic positions.

And I’m not just talking about DLC’ers or the New Democratic Network or the pro-Iraq war folks who’ve since said “I’m sorry, but the Retard-In-Chief fooled me completely” when the majority of elected Dems were never fooled. I’m also talking about both Bill and Hillary Clinton, who’ve been some of Bush’s strongest defenders. I’m talking about bloggers who position themselves as better than the Beltway campaign strategists, then start displaying the same level of compromising stances that the old guard used with minimal success.

If that’s their concept of the ‘netroots’, they’re simply cloning the same old scrub pine with nothing more than a fresh coat of green spraypaint. They’re the same losers who blamed the 2000 election outcome on Ralph Nader, who may be politically unwise at times, but he’s done more for US citizens than many elected Dems ever will.

The bottom line is not all this crap about Demofuckingcratic unity. People can’t vote in a Democratic majority because they can’t find enough real Democratics on their ballots. We’re told: “c’mon, you know we’re better than Bush anmd Cheney and Delay.” Yeah, but we could vote for rats and cockroaches and skulking coyotes and do better. That’s an awfully low bar to exceed and we’ve grown sick of this partisan game. Give us people that will do something for Americans without the party being their daddy.

Being a Democratic moderate isn’t Lieberman Frenchkissing Bush’s ass. It’s not Bob Casey opposing women’s right to choose. It’s not a party that advances James Webb, a rightwing asshole recently converted, while it abandons a longtime Dem activist just because he doesn’t have a military background. The miniscule primary turnout in Virginia should be the strongest clue about how unmotivated Virginians were to a party that dishonorably dumped its own.

A moderate Dem is Jon Tester, Stephanie Herseth, Howard Dean, Bill Richardson, Harry Reid, John Edwards and John Kerry. Though some of them have strayed to the right briefly, all of them have retained most democratic principles and considerable ethical foundations throughout their elective careers.

And it’s sad that there are some popular bloggers who have strayed much further away from those principles and ethics. Especially those whose genius provided some of the cornerstones and skyscrapers in the blogosphere. No, I don’t mean Kevin Drum, who is a moderate that displays considerable grace when under fire, when his views are sufficiently off-base to provoke a negative response.

Yes, I mean Kos, for one example. His banning policies have been mowing down liberals on his blog. Mary Scott O’Connor. The leading voice against fraudulent voting systems, Bev Harris. Others he dismisses too readily as ’single-issue voters’. Which seemingly means those who support abortion rights, those who opine about stolen elections, and some among historically marginalized minorities.

For as smart a guy as he is, he seems to take certain constituencies for granted. He wants to downplay a central issue for women. He wasn’t there to back Cynthia McKinney. He displays favoritism towards military vet Dems as if that’s necessary, why? To somehow demonstrate that Democrats aren’t peacenik wimps?

Dem does not stand for Demonstrate. Proving what the party stands for is pretty insecure. Some have even wondered if there’s some misogyny in his choices. I don’t play that surmise game. I just see evidence of exclusionary approaches that take some of the strongest Democratic constituencies for granted. And I don’t consider that moderate.

And now there’s this issue about Jerome Armstrong. I apparently missed last weekend’s ‘tizzy’ about it, which raises another point I’ve made previously. There’s way too much insiderism in the blogosphere. It’s like watching certain shortlived TV shows like Twin Peaks. If you miss one episode, you can’t follow the plotline and aficionados treat you like the uncool kid that’s wearing last year’s fashions.

Sorry, but I don’t live and breathe for Kos, Jerome, or anyone else. And neither does America. Most Dems I know are too busy working even to catch every nuance and misstep of George Bush, so why should any particular blogger or even mainstream media talking head require such attention to understand?

There’s way too many talented bloggers whose expertise deserves an occasional review to get into the cult of celebrity that demands daily fealty to one. I don’t know what Paris Hilton’s vagina looks like and I’m certain my intelligence, logic and ‘coolness’ is not endangered by what I’ve missed. The majority of this country and this Democratic Party are women and I’m sure not going to put the onus on the obviously physically attractive ones at Firedoglake and TalkLeft as if they represent the opinions and talents of all the rest of their gender.

There are some excellent Democratic elected officials and new candidates around the country. Some will make campaign mistakes, but that doesn’t mean they should be dismissed. The ones willing to take strong, principled positions, that don’t shrink from their convictions, deserve our support. Some can benefit from listening to the netroots. But guys like Trippi and Moulitsas and Armstrong are not prescient deities. They occasionally miss the urinal when they pee, like the rest of us mortals, and they occasionally get things exactly wrong.

Saying so doesn’t make me a heretic. It just means my input deserves a listen, like every other blogger out there deserves. Liberal to moderate candidates can get elected in spite of what any of us think or says, and no matter if we critique our own. After all, isn’t the banning of fellow bloggers a form of critique? Aren’t the backchannel dialogues that take place - like the one that took place about the Liberal BlogAd Network, that had two old-boy bloggers pushing out Raw Story - part of the circular firing squad?

And speaking of ads, I can recall three I rejected in the past two years. One was for a product line with names I found too sexist. One was for the Libertarian candidate for President in 2004. And the latest was for the big corporations opposing net neutrality, which I’ve seen on an abundance of progressive blogs lately.

Now, I’d bet I’m in the bottom 20 percent of income among bloggers and I sure don’t find it comfortable to refuse free money. But I find - and I’ve found all my life - that my comfort with myself requires that I make choices that conform to my principles, because making money is not even on my list of principles. It’s necessary to make some, but how I make my money counts a lot to me. I don’t require others to have identical standards to my own. But I do find it reassuring when the standards of others are displayed in their choices and actions, instead of only being displayed in their words.

That’s just another example of the main point I’m making, that I’d rather vote for Democrats whose actions demonstrate their principles and core ethics. There’s no large specific number of those that all need to adhere to. But there’s some core ones I consider the province of Democrats: support for human rights, support for the civil liberties so well demonstrated in the Bill of Rights and most subsequent Constitutional Amendments, fighting for workers in the bottom 60% of earnings that Republicans typically neglect, compassion for the marginalized and excluded range of minorities and the ill and the weak, and a sensible balance of military strength, diplomatic muscle and visionary statesmanship that demonstrates humaneness… because smart policies win far more battles than smart bombs, which, alone, can win nothing.

The only real problem I see in the ranks of the diverse party I choose to be a part of is the belief of some that there’s a narrow prescription to elective success. There is a narrow prescription - act like a fucking real Democrat - but that won’t guarantee every victory. It’ll only guarantee that more Democrats will show up at the polls with enthusiasm and have someone they can feel happy to vote for. It may even produce enough wins that provide Democrats with a majority of officeholders.

But we can’t know that for sure until we try that once again. Given the limited success of the DLC approach, I’d say the previous approaches, with Dems acting like Dems, has a far higher percentage of successful outcomes.

Feel free to disagree. Feel free to call me an asshole for singling out weak DINOs and celebrated bloggers (whose genius in building the blogosphere I’m not challenging at all). I’ll still maintain that the quality of Democratic candidates, and their capacity to determine America’s best interests and fight for those, far exceeds the value of any select group of consultants who abandon the small group of core Democrat principles in an effort to outMacchiavelli the other side.

At this point in our history, the reputation of America has fallen to its lowest point since the days of slavery 146 years ago. Every ally we had and every sympathetic people of any nation - a majority in virtually all of them - has turned away from us and all the human cruelties our leadership stands for and promotes. Even the much-hyped Coalition of the Willing in Iraq has become the Coalition of the Fleeing, with only Great Britain remaining (or nearly so). In our best moments, our country has been exceptional and a role model for the world. But in our worst, we are reviled, and is it really any wonder?

In this new era of politics that the GOP has defined as ‘winning is everything’, we risk the ultimate foolishness if we buy into that. The old saw instructed: “it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game.” And I believe it. Especially when I consider the other old saw: “history’s written by the victors.” Can you imagine this gang of Republicans writing a history resembling anything true?

Good sportsmanship is an integral part of statesmanship, of diplomacy, of the essence of humaneness and the moments of our exceptionalism as a country. I think Democrats have demonstrated it best, economically and militarily, in the past century, and the best socially in the past 40 years. A minority within our party has been dragged forward, kicking and screaming, in the latter case, and now’s not the time for us to accede to the footdraggers, or the even worse knuckledraggers in the GOP camp.

Let our candidates aim for the exceptional again, and we’ll do fine. Our critical role as citizens, party members and bloggers, is to recruit those candidates, not to see if we can wallow in the mud with pigs. Winning that way only grants us dominion over a mudpen. And we are capable of far more.