> [Hey Marvin, here's one I couldn't sign, but I wasn't asked anyway.]
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080818/open_letter> ======================================== Hah! Lots of good people on that list, Doug, (Zinn, Fletcher, Cole, Englehardt, etc.) but, yuck, they could have dropped the sycophantic title, first two and last paragraphs, and taken a scalpel to some of the equally abominable formulations in the fourth. Maybe some tried. Still, on a quick read, I thought the rest of the document was good, including the set of demands on Obama.
Look, to be clear, I sympathize with all of you all down there. The same ideological compromises are demanded of the socialist left in contemporary social democratic parties also, but the foreign policy issues in these parties are much less difficult to deal with than for leftists like yourselves in a a party which co-administers an empire. The compromises and dog work of canvassing for a party I didn't ever consider my own (the NDP) was why I dropped out of active politics two decades ago when it became evident that those of us on the far left no longer had a real living movement of our own to fight for. So I'm not about to cast stones at people who have made the same choice across the border, though I do admire people like Julio and other US radicals who are trying to do the best with what's at hand and wish them well.
It's the sneers (as opposed to principled political criticism) directed at the latter by inactive or marginally active intellectuals who somehow imagine that their participation in these internet salons constitutes a higher form of "revolutionary" political activity which I find objectionable. This isn't true, of course, of the great majority of people on the list who have taken their distance from the Democrats, but it's true of some who I wish would show some restraint and act in a more comradely way.