For the past few days, progressive Democrats on Twitter were treated to the spectre of "mainstream" Democrats (that's an uppercase D, certainly not lowercase) verbally attacking them with the same intensity and hostility they usually reserve for teabaggers.   The attacks varied in intensity from a paternalistic, "I know better than you", from people who are barely wet behind the ears, all the way to full bore, foaming at the mouth rants, complete with liberal use of the F-bomb.  These attacks have one thing in common, they accuse progressives of dividing the party and always claim that progressive bickering will cost the party re-elections and put Republicans in office.

To all of the delusional folks who think that progressives are as harmful to the Democratic party as the teabaggers just because we feel that the President and many of his advisors are diluting the change he promised during his campaign, rather than serving it straight-up,  get real!  I feel that palpable harm to the Democratic party is caused by many of it's politicians' tacitly supporting the Republican agenda by virtue of their own intentional lack of  consensus.  After all, politicians from BOTH parties get frequent visits from the same corporate lobbyists. This is an issue that has to be addressed by everyone who calls him or herself a progressive. We have to do lots of soul searching. 

In one sense, we owe our vociferous friends a vote of thanks for clarifying where we stand in the Democratic party and for opening up a gigantic can of worms.  Over the next couple of weeks, I am going to explore the situation in depth.  We will take a historical look at the post Reagan (yes, I said post Reagan) Democratic party to illustrate some shocking things. We (you and I) are also going to come up with a game plan that gets us on the right course.

To those "Democrats" who rant on Twitter and blindly support the party, even when it ignores the issues that traditionally define democratic thinking, I say to you - Strap yourself in, you're in for a bumpy ride!"  Oh, there's one more thing;  progressives don't whine, we get things done like getting Barack Obama elected, for example.