It's the use of the words "semi-competent" that send a chill down my spine

Kos has a good post building on a piece in The Economist about the question most of us leftys are asking: Just how suicidal are the Democrats? The Economist sez:

The Republicans are so unpopular that any semi-competent opposition party should be sauntering to victory in the mid-term elections in November.

It's true; even Fox-flippin'-news yesterday had Bush's job approval rating at 33%. But as I say, it's those words "semi-competent" that scare me. Ted Kennedy was on Fresh Air and The Daily Show yesterday. I missed the radio appearance but I can tell you that judging from TDS, Sherman's right: It was very much a stay-on-the-talking-points kind of interview. But what were those talking points? The DNC-approved "we can do better" and "withdrawl from Iraq-but with honor!"

Seems to me I've heard the "with honor" thing before in histories of the Vietnam war. It seems to be what we say when, for some reason, we just can't say, you know what, this has been a complete and utter cock-up from the beginning, there is no getting out with honor, and so we just have to get out now.

But anyway, back to The Economist.

"For the Americans in the middle, who have no strong partisan allegiances, we have failed to articulate a real plan or vision," say Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong, two of the most popular Democratic bloggers. "It's not that people know what we stand for and disagree; it's that they have no idea what we stand for," say James Carville and Paul Begala, two of the architects of Bill Clinton's winning presidential campaign in 1992. The junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, one of the Democrats' most admired politicians, has tried to make a joke of it. "You hear this constant refrain from our critics that Democrats don't stand for anything," he remarked the other day. "That's really unfair. We do stand for anything."

See, here's why I'm wary of Kos and have little or no interest in reading his book, though I do read the blog (obviously). On the one hand, he says the Democrats have to appeal to the middle. This is the thinking that brought us Kerry '04 and Gore 2000.

Then he says things like this-

The GOP WILL motivate its voters come November. They'll rail on abortion and gays and scary brown people crossing the southern border and how Democrats want to take their Bibles away. And their core supporters will turn out. And Democrats, unless they realize that they need to inspire, will find those huge gains will fail to materialize.

You cannot have leadership without offending someone. Someone once said you could measure Bobby Kennedy's greatness by the number of enemies he had. George Bush and Karl Rove know this, and they don't care who they offend as they seek to inspire and motivate their core supporters.

-with which it it would seem hard to disagree. Except that if memory serves, each and every time a pro-choice, pro-gay or other "special interest" group has stood up and demanded that the Democrats live up to their inspirational rhetoric...or they can't count on their vote... Kos is almost always among the first to say:

"Shut up, man, you're gonna queer the deal!"

I think women and gays and "scary brown people" are to the Democratic party what those not-at-all gullible folks who believe themselves to have a good dose of the Holy Spirit are to the Republicans: People you say the right words to in order to get their votes, regardless of whether you really mean them or not.

And then you turn around and do whatever shitty things will keep you in the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed. And I'm not sure, but I think Kos really, really wants to get accustomed to that lifestyle.