Reply #28: Yep -today's Democratic Party

[DancingBear]

Amazingly enough, I lived through that era, so perhaps (unlike you?) I have no need for wikipedia.

I find it curious that you left out LBJ, but perhaps that did not fit the response you wished to sculpt. He's the guy that came AFTER Kennedy, and I believe he may have done a few things in that civil rights arena.

Now, I seem to recall a bunch of Dems fighting (ah, there's the operative word, yes?) for things like reducing the voting age to 18, the Equal Rights Amendment, Watergate, ending the war - you know, stuff that like, well, DEMOCRATS actually care about.

The end sum game is not what matters always, it's how one approaches the battle. Many of those battles were, as you say, lost, but we FOUGHT them. There were defined differences between the parties then.

Oh, and about the filibuster. Neither Thomas, nor Scalia, nor Rehnquist were in the position to dismantle as many civil rights as Alito is. They were arch-conservatives, and of course Thomas has proved to be nothing more than the insipid lackey for the right that we all knew him to be, but they were not the demonic threat that Alito is.

We are now, as a party, resigned to hitting the bully on the wrist and then running away and hiding behind the tree.

It's kind of like the whole "keeping your powder dry" thing that I'm guessing you 're pretty fond of.