Democrats: please get your acts together

Dear Democratic Party,

Guys, first off, let’s get a few things out of the way. I like you. I like what you stand for. I think you are on the whole swell people who stand for an America that I’d really like to be a part of, an America of pluralism and individual liberty. An America where nobody gets left behind and everyone gets a fair shake in life in practice, not just in theory.

That said, I am really sick of all your crap lately, and by lately, I mean the past six to 10 years.

Yes, I understand that you’re the minority party, and as such, your voice in government is limited.

I also get that if you want to get anything done you’ve got to work with the majority and not just be obstructionists, but do you think you could maybe, maybe grow a little bit of a spine? For me, your old pal, Evan? Please?

I mean, nobody even knows what you guys stand for these days, other than “not being Republicans” that is, and really that’s just not going to cut it anymore—not to imply that it ever actually did.

You need to assert yourselves and act like freaking grown-ups who have some sort of honest-to-God plan for how they want the country to be run. It’s time to take some issues and make your damned voices heard.

Let’s start with an easy one: torture and extraordinary rendition. You can pretty much just say “We’re not for that,” and it constitutes a valid counter-position. In fact, “I’m against torture in all its forms,” makes for a very workable plank in a campaign, plus it fits on a bumper sticker. Bonus points.

However, I certainly don’t mean to imply that I don’t sympathize with the situation in which you regularly find yourselves. It’s really hard to counter an absolutist position with a nuanced one. It’s stupidly easy for someone to say something painfully jingoistic like, “I support defending our borders,” and act like that completely sums up and validates the entirety of their political opinion.

Then you have to sit there and argue that, while of course you also support defending our borders (that’s a ridiculous and meaningless platitude, by the way), the situation is complicated and maybe protecting the country involves a little something more than just being unrepentantly hawkish at every turn in the hope that, by way of some Cro-Magnon-esque chest thumping, all of America’s enemies can be made to cower in fear before our awesome might.

Of course, then you get painted as a waffler who lacks the courage of his convictions, a very difficult label to break, but that doesn’t mean you should just run away from your own position. It just means you’ve got to get in there and actually explain why you believe what you do, despite the sad reality that very often the world is just too complicated to fit into a sound bite on Fox News, and that maybe we ought to approach it as such.

And above all, you’ve got to stick to your freaking guns. How do you think the Republicans got something so patently absurd as “abstinence works” to become the basis for our nation’s approach to Sex Ed? It certainly wasn’t on the strength of the argument.

I know the deck’s stacked against you. Your opponents have been defining the terms of the debate for a long time now (way to not get on the ball in any way, shape or form to try to remedy that situation, by the way), but the time has come to step up and act like the opposition party you’re actually supposed to be.

Oh, and one more little thing. You really need to admit that you dropped the ball on that whole Iraq War thing. Sure, sure, you acted in good faith on the intelligence that was presented to you, but the time has come for all good men to swallow a little pride, admit we were wrong, and try think of some way to begin de-crapping the bed.

But then again, what do I know? I’m just a college kid who needed an editorial topic at the last minute.