I encourage everyone to read the following from political scientist Jonathan Bernstein:
Weighing in on Glenn Greenwald's claims about Barack Obama, the Democrats, and the Lincoln/Halter primary:
What happened in this race also gives the lie to the insufferable excuse we've been hearing for the last 18 months from countless Obama defenders: namely, if the Senate doesn't have 60 votes to pass good legislation, it's not Obama's fault because he has no leverage over these conservative Senators. It was always obvious what an absurd joke that claim was; the very idea of The Impotent, Helpless President, presiding over a vast government and party apparatus, was laughable.
I don't know how to respond to this nicely: this is ignorant nonsense that betrays a deep lack of understanding of how the government of the United States works.
http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogsp...
Essentially, Mr. Bernstein is pointing out that much of the progressive blog criticism of Obama has flown far away from the reality-based community. I agree with him. It's sad, because one of the things that attracted me to the blogsphere in the first place was its deep commitment to reality-based analysis.
But reality doesn't always give you pat feel-good solutions. Reality is much harder than that. As Bernstein says, that's frustrating.
All of which is very frustrating for liberals. Pretending that their allies are really their enemies, however, is a particularly self-punishing way of dealing with that frustration.