Make the call

Nice Guys are not nice

(inspired by Why "Nice Guys" are often such LOSERS)

As a reformed Nice Guy who has thought a lot about this I can say with conviction that the biggest problem with Nice Guys is that they actually aren't nice at all.

The Nice Guy attitude can be reduced to this: "If I let her cry on my shoulder she'll have sex with me."

In other words, the Nice Guy doesn't really care about the feelings of the woman he is interested in. He is just using his "niceness" as a ploy to get in her pants.

And women understand this, even if only at a subconscious level, which is why they never sleep with the Nice Guy.

As the article above suggests, the decent women run away because they know how the Nice Guy operates while The Bitches play along because it's fun to make Nice Guys jump through hoops.

Nice Guys need to get over themselves and need to learn to actually give a crap about other human beings besides themselves.

Hit the Donkey

I am generally opposed to the "pox on both their houses" school of political thought. It is patently absurde to suggest that our country's future will be unchanged whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge.

But the idea that the present Democrats are going to lead the charge to progressive reform in this nation is also extremely untenable. Both parties are compromised. It's just that the Republicans are gleefully compromised while the Democrats, at least, make noises about it being a bad thing.

Which is why I find this dKos diary by TocqueDeville powerful. His analysis of the two competing strains in progressive strategy ("change the party from within" vs. "punish the party until they change") is spot on. I also think he is, unfortunately, correct that a purely "change the party from within" strategy can't work because any reformer who moves into a corrupted system will inevitably eventually become corrupted.

TD suggests that the weapon missing in the progressive political strategy is the stick that we can reasonably use against the Democrats. Simply threatening to abandon the Democrats in toto (the "punish the party until they change" strategy) is unacceptable because the threat of Republicans regaining power is unacceptable. But what if we were to us a more selective stick? What if we were to say that losing one or two house seats to the Republicans might be acceptable? What if we were to say that it might be a good thing?

What if we were to actively seek to defeat Steny Hoyer and let a Republican win his seat? The Democrats would still retain control of the house, but the leadership might think twice about pissing off the activist base (instead of the grudging acceptance it receives today).

It's a radical idea and it will certainly piss off a lot of Democrats. But maybe they need to be pissed off.

After all, donkey's need to be hit with a board every now and then.

Out Of The Wilderness

From 1994 to 2006 the Democrats were completely out of power in the U.S. Congress. During that time, a huge backlog of liberal/progressive legislative priorities built up. So, when the Democrats regained control in 2007, they naturally wanted to focus their attention on the things they spent 12 years in the wilderness waiting to accomplish.

Unfortunately, there was this little matter of a war and a constitutional crisis to deal with. Did the Democrats put off their pet projects in order to deal with these issues? No. Will they?

Not yet.

I've said it before that the biggest mistake the Democrats made since regaining power is misunderstanding why they were given power in the first place. Normally, obstructionism is a bad thing. But when the country is lead by an out-of-control executive branch, obstructing the overreach of that branch supersedes all other priorities.

The Democrats have not accepted that. And that is why the country is so pissed off at them. The only saving grace they have is that the country hates Bush even more. But Bush won't be around much longer (knock on wood). But his legacy will haunt this country for decades. Will the Democrats make cleaning up his mess a priority once he is gone?

We shall see.