It’s true. I’m a nobody. I marginalize myself by refusing to get on board the Anyone-But-Republicans bus. Fellow Dems consider those who don’t play along to be useless, even traitors.

So many, many times, I’ve fallen for it, gone along, settled. I’m 54 now. The odds are high, based on family history, that I’ll get no more than 5 to 6 presidential elections to go with the 9 I’ve already been through. I won’t compromise. I’ll continue to battle to get others not to compromise.

Vacillation has destroyed the Left more than any other factor. (See Dahlia Lithwick to know what’s drawing today’s ire)

Hoover (actually, Coolidge) gave us the Great Depression, but that alone was insufficient to achieve the reforms of the New Deal. It also took a rising Socialist movement. That gave FDR room to be progressive and appear more centrist than the many agitating from the Left.

I’ve made similar analogies before with Malcolm X, whose extreme positions made Martin Luther King appear more moderate. Each was vital to the process of gaining great gains.

Today, we face more than just a need for progressive reforms. We are in the midst of a Constitutional crisis, a far bigger threat than anything Al Qaeda poses. Even were they to nuke a US city, they could not overthrow the country. But the people destroying our Constitution can, and are taking over the country. We already have Faux News and Faux Government is uncomfortably close.

Moderation in defense of liberty is for sellout weenies. The comfortable class of Dems that can support Hillary or Biden can kiss my ass.

As Lithwick suggests, Congressional Dems may be playing politics, keeping Alberto front and center thinking this will payoff 15 months from now. They’ve forgotten political history. If it ain’t front page in the final 6 months, Alberto won’t matter. Richard Nixon taught me that, as shrewd a political analyst as there’s been in my lifetime, despite his flaws once in office.

Dems are projecting themselves as a party of vacillators, of weak hands more interested in playing political games instead of getting a crowd behind them by proving they can and will fight. To me it doesn’t matter if I appear extreme. We need lots more extremists to keep pulling the center leftward, back to a reasonable middle. In fact, all I see is the middle is STILL moving to the right.

You want affordable healthcare? You think it’s getting closer? Keep deluding yourselves. Teddy Kennedy’s been working for that for more than 30 years and even a vital champion like that has been frustrated, long before anyone knew who Hilary was. We’re always pointing out that we’re the only industrialized nation without it, to spread the notion we’re falling further behind the others.

Yet what’s really happening is those European socialist programs are being pushed back our way, not the other way around. Big money corrupts everywhere and it’s not ceding any ground in this fight. It will be that way till enough people quit settling. We need to be demanding far more than national healthcare as our starting point. Shoot for Mars and settle for the moon.

As long as we simply beg for the crest of the nearest hill, we’ll keep getting the gutter.

I don’t care if I become a political outcast that doesn’t get invited to the tony affairs where the kewl kids hobnob. I’ve watched for 40+ years as progressivism has come undone. Roosevelt’s reforms are nearly gone. Not just FDR’s but Teddy’s as well.

We need to bust the trusts, the interlocking corporate directorates, even of innovative tech companies. We don’t need a return of the Fairness Doctrine, we need to push for more. For a social safety net, we can’t settle for saving Social Security while everything else gets underfunded by the encroaching costs of GOP militarism and perpetual war.

We’ve settled too many times. The myth that Dems are soft on foreign policy lives on, despite the facts of wars we won, because the party appears too meek fighting the doughy, pasty, corrupt idiots of te GOP. If we can’t take them, how can we take on foreign enemies? Yes, I know we can and have and will. But it’s all about perception. And settling, instead of radicalism, has cost us dearly since 1972.

I won’t vote for Hilary. I may avoid voting for any Dems for federal office, going entirely Green.

We need progressive advances. And the national Dems, despite the good work done by Dean, and Kucinich and Gravel, et al, do not have a strategy that leads past next Election Day, that offers hope for alternate energy initiatives with teeth, that inspires confidence to workers, that makes me think we can keep Roe v. Wade or the civil rights advances gained through so much spilled blood.

I refuse to outsource my fight. I won’t settle for being a weenie. Maybe it works for you but all it’s done for me is Iran-Contra, Abu Ghraib, disenfranchised voters, outsourced jobs, a Supreme Court that will terrorize us for years to come, and perpetual Middle East wars for the benefit of Enron, Exxon-Mobil and Halliburton.

No thanks. No way.