Literally, cow manure.
Did you know that progressives were the ones who fought for federal meat safety laws?
It started with progressive muckrakers writing about the horrid, unsanitary conditions in meat packing facilities. Upton Sinclair, in his 1906 book The Jungle, elevated the issue to national discourse, and voila! - that very same year, the Meat Inspections Actand the Pure Food and Drug Act were passed into law.
This allowed federal inspectors to come in and inspect meat packing facilities. You don't want to know what they found.
One of the most disturbing trends since the ascension of Barack Obama to leader of the Democratic party, is the increased hostility towards progressives.
Perhaps he set the tone when allowed his chief of staff to call progressives "fucking retarded."
Many of Obama's staunchest defenders here have even tried to turn the word progressive into a pejorative, calling people "True Progressives" as though that were an insult.
I've also seen use of the word almost vanish in some Democratic circles and, at a meeting I attended recently, a person suggested we stop using "progressive" in our marketing because it had a negative connotation.
Let's get something straight.
If it weren't for progressives, children would still toil 16 hours a day in factories, our environment would be a toxic wasteland, our food wouldn't be safe to eat, and our skies would be so polluted they would block out the sun.
There would have never been an American middle class because only a handful of Americans would have made more than poverty wages.
There would be no workers' rights, workers compensation or, God forbid, labor unions because there would have been no Wagner Act.
And, of course, progressives are the reason you have the Social Security program, the most popular government program in the history of government.
FDR was opposed to social security. Did you know that? It took progressives threatening to throw him out of office to get the law passed.
The fact is, Progressives are, and have always been, the adults in the room.
When Wall Street bankers and their little minions in Washington almost destroyed themselves and everyone else, it was the adults to had to make them keep their greedy little fingers out of the cookie jar.
It was the adults who stopped them from turning our banks into a casino, threatening our very livelihood.
It has always been the adults who protected us from the childish idiots who would sacrifice the our very future for a moment of gratification.
The fact is, if it weren't for progressives, this would be a fucking hell hole of a country. You wouldn't even recognize it.
It's time we put the adults back in charge, while we still have time to repair the damage of letting greedy, stupid children run rampant.