Reply #16: OK, I accept that you have the right to disagree with what I believe in

[Ken Burch]

But who are you to say that my beliefs are phony?

And what, exactly, did those of us who are progressives ever stand for that was that terrible, of that wrong?

We were right on civil rights(and you centrists wouldn't have done a damn thing to end Jim Crow if the left hadn't forced the issue from below)

We were right on Vietnam(again, you guys would have cheerfully renominated LBJ and sent the party down to a much bigger defeat in '68 than we had because you forced the party to nominate Humphrey and have him run as an all-out hawk)

We were right on Central America, on the insanity or Reagan's nuclear buildup, on the immorality of the cuts in social services in the '80s.

We were right to want unions to gain strength again and to keep pushing for repeal of Taft-Hartley.

We were right to oppose the corporate-backed and corporate-drafted "free trade" deals that force working people around the planet to compete to see who will work for the lowest wages.

We were and are right to support full equality for gays and lesbians. There IS no center ground between justice and injustice.

We are right today to lead the fight to stop this psychotic conflict in Iraq, the bloodsoaked disaster that an invasion of Iran would have to be, and the nightmare that U.S-backed overthrows of the democratic governments of Venezuela and Bolivia.

Clinton didn't need to repudiate ANY of that to win. The voters weren't demanding a Democrat who sounded more like the Republicans than different from them. They didn't want our party to surrender.

You can't seriously point to anything in the above list as something Democrats should have been ashamed of or that progressives weren't sincere in backing. No one would ever give insincere support to an unpopular position, and a lot of our positions weren't and AREN'T unpopular anyway.