Come Saturday Morning: The Purity Obsession

Recently, in a Twitter discussion with a normally-sensible person, the topic of Obama vs. the Progs came up, and the first thing Normally-Sensible Person did was to start yammering about the alleged progressive obsession with “purity”, when in fact the discussion wasn’t about purity (whatever that is nowadays) at all.

It occurs to me that in fact the self-styled sensible types are not arguing against “purity” but the progressives’ right to exist, much less speak out. When somebody condemns Obama’s jones to rob Medicare and Social Security so he can please the rich corporate interests whose 2012 cash he craves, the Sensible Ones immediately start singing the Purity Troll Chorus. When somebody (a somebody who likely spent much of 2007 and 2008 phonebanking for Obama) asks why people like Dan Choi are put on trial for allegedly desecrating the White House grounds with their presence yet drunken frat boys are allowed to puke on, pee on, and swing from White House trees, the Sensible Ones retort with “So are you voting for Perry or Bachmann?”

The Sensible Centrists, not the progressives, are the ones who truly cannot tolerate any deviation from what they consider the norm, which as practiced by the controlling corporate-based wing of the Democrats is the slow strangulation of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and pretty much everything else good that came of the New Deal and the Great Society. Torture and rendition and murder are apparently just fine when done under the watch of a Democrat, and even calls to prosecute such acts done under the aegis of a Republican administration are swept aside with calls to “look forward, not backward”; the whistleblowers, not the wrongdoers, are the ones prosecuted, just as persons exercising their First Amendment rights get arrested and put on trial.

Oh, well.