So "liberals" MUST be nice....

I got a little inspiration from the Book Salon going on over at firedoglake tonight....the guest happens to be Cliff Schecter who has earned his "bones" in the land of Left Blogsylvania by actually standing up to Right wing pundits on National Television. Currently he's working on a book and also collaborating with Glenn Greenwald on a new blogsite dedicated to "The Real John McCain".

If you pop on over to fdl (as us ....ahem regulars ....call it) you'll see that Cliff is no fan of McCain's and this new blogsite is going to be brutal.....

But the discussion is actually deeper than that....here's a snippet....

.... For those of us who cringe at the mealy-mouthed equivocations of most liberal pundits, for those of us who shout at the television every time we watch another spineless lefty wither under the torrent of incoherent abuse that spews out of Ann Coulter like bilge-water, for the people in the audience who wanted to throttle John Kerry for knuckling under to the character smears of the 2004 campaign, Cliff Schecter is a ray of hope. A tiger in a tea room. A bomb in a china shop.

I have long maintained that it is incumbent on the left to present arguments and narratives that are as metabolically exciting and visceral as the arguments put forth by the right. Again and again, I see left wing pundits and politicians bring knives to the right-wing gun fights and get their asses handed to them by the fast-talking, interrupting, belligerent conservative Opinionati. In a political environment as highly charged and combative as the one that the Republicans have been constructing since Newt Gingrich reared his ugly head in 1994, it's political suicide to cling to some kind of outdated notion that liberals have to be "nice", passive, and accomodating. We all just want to hold hands and sing Kum Ba Yah, right? Get naked and shake our dreadlocks at Bonnaroo, but that's after we all have a long, long talk about our feelings over a pot of fennel twig tea because Everyone's Viewpoint is Valid to a Certain Extent, right?

Yeah, right.

Do you know who Alan Colmes is? He's the "liberal" half of the Fox News Network show "Hannity and Colmes". If you've seen the show you know that the only reason that Colmes is there is to be the foil/whipping boy of nutcase Sean Hannity. It actually took me a while to figure it out because (silly me) I thought the whole idea of the show was to give both sides an equal shot at the issue....it isn't...and Alan Colmes is on that show not to be really liberal, but, instead to play what Fox News and Sean Hannity THINK a liberal should be.....that is,

weak
mealy-mouthed
defferential
easily cowed into submission.

Now, in all fairness to Alan Colmes, he may be none of those things, but he is playing a role...much like Bob Denver played Gilligan on Gilligan's Island, or, Alan Alda played Hawkeye on M.A.S.H......Alan Colmes plays a LIBERAL ON TV...or at least what we've been stereotyped as....

That's what makes Schecter so special....he breaks the mold..as our friends at FDL say, "...he's a shark in the kiddie pool..."

We need more of these.....

Think about this a moment....One of the few reasons people still like anything about George W. Bush is because he's combatative and stands up for what he believes...even if he's wrong....maybe the public would respect Democrats more if they behaved like Schecter. ..take the Republican attack dogs head on and bite them back...

good to think about...