San Francisco Green Party

Glenn Greenwald posted a really insightful article today about Obama's continuing attempts to kill off Social Security and Medicare.

While Pelosi and other liberal Democrats have immediately gone into damage control mode, Greenwald points out that although the liberal wing of the Democratic Party will make noise, they will ultimately fall in line, just like those congresspeople who flip-flopped on the mandatory health insurance bill after signing a pledge not to support it.

Greenwald effectively busts the myth of the "spineless Democrat:"

When I first began writing about politics in late 2005, the standard liberal blogosphere critique -- one I naively believed back then -- was that Democrats were capitulating so continuously to the Bush agenda because they "lacked spine" and were inept political strategists: i.e., they found those policies so very offensive but were simply unwilling or unable to resist them.  It became apparent to me that this was little more than a self-soothing conceit: Democrats continuously voted for Bush policies because they were either indifferent to their enactment or actively supported them, and were owned and controlled by the same factions as the GOP.

Greenwald also makes the point that the Democratosphere (e.g., MoveOn, Daily Kos, FDL) will also predictably fall in line after a token protest:

Similarly, those progressive commentators who are first and foremost Democratic loyalists -- who rose up in angry and effective unison (along with actual progressives) to prevent George Bush from privatizing Social Security in 2005 -- will mount no meaningful opposition out of fear of weakening the President's political prospects.

Their ability to neuter opposition to deeply regressive ideas has led other insightful bloggers to conclude that Democrats are worse than Republicans.  While Greenwald doesn't go that far, the results may, unfortunately, speak for themselves.

(We expressed some of the same thoughts in our 2010 Green Voter Guide as well, although not as eloquently as GG.)