The Phenomenon of Dems Bashing Dems

Sometimes, it's hard to tell which is worse:

Republicans so eager to be on the same message, endless expressing the very same talking points as one another to the point where you feel that someone like Karl Rove or Dick Cheney just record sound bytes for them to endlessly repeat even when it contradicts what these people - or the whole damned party - have said just days or hours before OR

Democrats who endlessly beat up far more effectively on one another than they do on the GOP or the Bush Administration (and mind you, I'm not big on beating somebody up just because they're the opposition - sadly, however, there's just so many justifiable reasons for going up against the Bushies like that they're bad for humans and other living things).

There are a very tiny number of GOPers who ever go against the Bush/Cheney/Rove message and what few there are get ostracized and minimalized. Examples:

* Christine Todd Whitman whose been trying (and I do mean trying) to say that the party's leadership is far too extreme while the majority of Republicans are far more moderate

* Pat Buchanan in those rare moments of clarity when he's honest and admits what he said before: Iraq is wrong, the Bushies are bullies, and most people aren't as rabid right in the GOP as the current GOP leadership would have you believe

* Arnold the Gropinator, who also has rare moments of clarity in which he supports stem cell research, women's rights (and his right to grope them, sadly), and distances himself from GOP Nutwing

* David Kay, the former UN weapons inspector turned WMD Chief who was Bush's biggest cheerleader in Iraq before he started choking on the Kool Aid

But among Democrats, it seems relatively rare these days to have any two in a vocal position utter the exact same message. Those with a national or published platform, the ones the GOP likes to see trotted out, are often the worst. Think Mickey Kaus, Jeff Jarvis, Howard Fineman, Joe Lieberman, just to name a very few. You'd almost think the objective of these folks - all self-declared Democrats - is to go along with Tom DeLay's plan to make this a one party (GOP) country where Democrats are either imprisoned in Gitmo, shot, or exiled to Canada. But again, these are the Dems the GOP likes so these are the ones who aren't minimalized.

This phenomenon always reminds me of the phenom of the self-hating Jew (like some of those who went so hard after the Rosenbergs like Roy Cohn), the self-hating homosexual (again, there's Roy Cohn, J Edgar, Andrew Sullivan, Jeff Gannon aka Pimpette), and the self-hating woman (Phyllis Schafly and even Laura Bush).

Anyway, Oliver Willis tackles this subject and I encourage you to take a peek. Here's a bit:

I don't think every Democrat has the answers. I think Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are hustlers. I think Dennis Kucinich is naive to the point of absurdity. But by God, none of them are as vile as major leaders within the Republican party like Tom Delay and Dick Cheney. And among all the other Democrats out there, like Howard Dean, John Kerry, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and beyond – I'm not going to slime them like the media and the right do with the kind of habit a crack dealer depends on, simply to score points with a group of people who are laughing behind my back and looking for a good place to stick the knife.