Thursday: Is The Confluence a liberal blog?

Duh!  Have you read our Credo?

Yes, we are a liberal blog.

But, but, but, some of you voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Believe me, that was not an easy decision for some of us.  Some of us cried afterwards.  But we made it clear that we didn’t vote for them because we are closet Republicans.  In fact, we disagreed with just about everything they stood for, although, we think they were much more serious about dealing with the bailout bill as it was happening.

Ours were protest votes.  We were protesting the un-Democratic manner in which Barack Obama was selected as our party’s nominee.  You didn’t really think we would be stupid enough to reward that outrage of unfairness and cheating, did you?  How Republican would that have been?  It would mean that our primary season is meaningless.  It would mean that hooliganism and stacking the deck and cherry picking is OK.  It would reduce voting to a pointless exercise. We predict that that will come back to haunt the party in four years.

I think it is time for Obama Democrats to come to terms with this.  Actually, Democrats have a very Jewish attitude about doing something wrong.  Many of them will feel guilty for the next four years.  You Obamaphiles who are reading this have spent half a year rationalizing and denying the truth to yourselves.  You *know* that what went on in the primaries that cost Hillary the nomination was wrong.  You used every nasty Republican generated meme against Hillary even though you knew they were false.  You know in your hearts that it is wrong to discriminate against the gay community.  You know that the sexism that brought Hillary down was a sin against everything you believed.  But the bloodlust was singing in your ears and you were so determined to win at all costs that you allowed yourselves to get swept up in the moment.  You bought into the false narrative that Barack Obama was the savior that would sweep generations of segregation and narrow minded behavior into the dustbin of history.

Then he turned around and invited Rick Warren to his inauguration.

See, a real liberal would never do such a thing.

I’ve spend more than a decade running from the label “liberal”.  I’ve tried on “progressive” and “moderate” and “centrist”.  I prefer to say that I am a Rational Democrat.  And for most of us rationalists, that means we are liberals.  We believe in the equality of all people regardless of race, gender, religion, national origin or sexual orientation.  We believe in social justice, that even if you aren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth that you deserve the same opportunities as those who were.  We believe in justice for all, not just for the moneyed few.  We believe that people should be able to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps and that means giving them boots. We believe in fiscal responsibility.  We believe in deficit spending when it serves the purpose of building new infrastructure.  We believe in paying our taxes.  We believe in privacy.  We believe that a woman’s body is her own.  We believe in sustainability and a healthy planet.  We believe that we already have all the strength we need to rule the world but what we need is diplomacy so that we don’t ever have to use it.

In none of our beliefs is there a single issue mentality.  We do not advocate for one group over another or one cause over another.  We live by the preamble of the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Union. Common. General Welfare.  Blessings of Liberty.  Justice.  It doesn’t get any more liberal than that.

So, you Obamaphiles out there who are objecting to our inclusion as a nominee for Best Liberal Blog for the 2008 Weblog Awards have to ask yourselves, are you liberal?  The Blessings of Liberty mean suffrage and choice.  We, as liberals, would never prevent you from choosing to vote for any of the other blogs on the list just as we would never prevent, intimidate, harrass, mislead or threaten delegates at the 2008 Democratic Convention from voting for the candidate of their constituents’ choice.

That’s liberal and we are proud to count ourselves as liberals.