Feb 3, 2017
Open Letter To My Fellow Foot-Shooting Liberals
Every move Trump makes places another weight on my chest. Every day I’m beside myself, my blood pressure rising as the limits of my capacity for incredulity are tested. I read and I sign and I forward and I re-tweet until I have to X-out lest I explode.
Around 5:30pm today, having already covered the latest atrocities in the arenas of immigration, gun control, and national security, I saw that Trump announced his intention to have two male CEOs advising him on the issue of women in the workforce. I saw red. That was today’s tipping point, arbitrary as it may be. Each day has one.
But for once, my ire wasn’t immediately directed toward our mentally unfit President and the monstrous advisors he’s surrounded himself with. This time, I found myself irate at my fellow liberal, inclusive, semi-evolved Americans, who — as we know — are empirically the majority. I’m irate because we make the same damn mistakes over and over and, no, they don’t have to do with likeability, or the Electoral College, or who lives in what bubble. They have to do with liberals’ addiction to shooting ourselves in the foot. And for that, I am so mad.
I’m mad at you for shitting on candidates who are pretty damn amazing in pursuit of unattainable, nonexistent perfection.
You should have known that that’s a luxury we can’t afford because we can never, ever allow ourselves to feel comfortable about the direction of the country. The happier you feel about how things are going, the angrier the intolerant right-wingers America is filled with are feeling. And the angrier they feel, the scarier they get. That’s why all this is happening.
I’m mad at you for being completely unrealistic about what Presidents and politicians can and can’t do.
You believed Obama when he promised he’d “change” Washington. Then you were disappointed when he didn’t, because he couldn’t. You nitpicked when you should have been thanking your lucky liberal stars for how good you had it, how nice it was to have a President you could be proud of. You didn’t believe Trump when he made all the horrific campaign promises he made. If you truly had, you would have gotten over your pursuit of unattainable, nonexistent perfection and gotten the fuck on board with Hillary in a meaningful, passionate way. That’s why all this is happening.
I’m mad at you for being complacent because you’d become accustomed to eight years of trusting Obama to generally do the right thing.
Are your memories really that short? W. left office just EIGHT YEARS ago. We should have been in the streets when the Republicans refused to give Merrick Garland a hearing. Who cares that we all thought Hillary was going to win, what they did was FUCKED and we should have been in the STREETS. Instead we took it, with barely a peep. While I’m at it, I’m mad at you, President Obama, for not stopping the presses on everything else and making that SCOTUS nomination — your rightful nomination — the ONLY thing that mattered. That was complacency, too. That was counting our chickens. That’s why all this is happening.
All of this shouldn’t be happening. WE SHOULDN’T BE HERE.
But here we are. And here is where I pivot my ire to our elected Democratic officials, particularly those in the Senate, the beloved and at times respectable institution that used to employ me.
You’ve shown some chutzpah in the past three months since Trump was elected, but nowhere near enough. You’ve pushed and delayed and made statements that made it seem like you might make trouble, but nowhere near enough.
A former Senate colleague of mine, a moderate Republican whom I respect highly, chastised me recently for applauding your efforts to slow the confirmation process for Trump’s despicable cadre of Cabinet nominees. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work, he said. The Democrats shouldn’t sink to the Republicans’ level — they should lead by example until the Republicans rise to theirs.
Steve, I love you, but Fuck. That.
As of today, out of all of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, there’s only one that we’re within reach of not confirming. One. (It’s not lost on me that she’s a woman. One of only three Trump nominated. Is that why she came closest to defeat? Because surely, given the company she’s in, she’s not THE WORST of all of them. She doesn’t have deep ties to a country that has committed cyber warfare against us. She’s not been accused of domestic violence. She hasn’t forgotten the name of the agency she’s been tapped to lead at some point in the past. I mean, she’s a disaster — don’t get me wrong — but the absolute worst?)
But back to that one potential defeat you’ll be able to claim. It’s not enough. It’s barely a pebble of the hashtag-resistance-raised-fist-emoticon that your supporters have been calling for. So to the 48 Senators who caucus with the Democrats, know this:
We’re mad at you for trying to save the institution instead of trying to save the nation.
We’re mad at you for taking what you frame as the high road when really you’re just conceding the point over and over and over.
We’re mad at you for thinking the emergency is your job security instead of our national security.
We’re mad at you for being afraid of your own shadows.
We’re mad that we even need to fucking call your offices when we should be able to sleep at night knowing you’re never, ever going to fold.
So let me ask you: How far does this have to go? How far until we burn the fucking house down? Or, rather, the Senate?
Because as mad as I am at my fellow liberals — and, necessarily, at myself — it’s alleviated just a bit by the massive mobilization we’ve been a part of over the past 14 days. It may be a day late and a dollar short, but we’re finally taking it to the streets.
Show us you get it. Show us by saving the Supreme Court from a 49-year-old mini-Scalia. Show us by saving ACA, too. Show us by saving our nation’s reputation as a beacon and refuge for those who dare to seek a better life. Show us by saving no less than the soul of America.
You want to lead by example? Don’t do it by respecting the time-honored traditions and decorum of the Senate. Do it by, just for once, refusing to shoot all of us in the foot.
