L.A. Weekly columnist Marc Cooper has some tough luv for fellow "progressives:" get off this ridiculous Bush impeachment jag, crawl out of your hermetically-sealed echo chamber, and confront your opponents on the issues. His exemplar? None other than Al Gore, who's been on a roll lately - at least for Al Gore. Here's Cooper:

Impeachment fever has officially broken out, and it makes the avian flu look like a two-day head cold. The primary symptoms are sustained delusional bouts that lead the victims to imagine that a Republican-controlled Congress — on the eve of midterm elections, no less — would actually indict and convict a sitting president from its own party. The infection first broke out on the Web — the primary cases detected in places like Democrats.com or AfterDowningStreet.org. This week the epidemic has spread to public spaces — to rented church halls and town meetings — where the infected gather and collectively visualize Chief Justice John Roberts putting George W. Bush on trial. If you happen to stumble into one of these gatherings of the infirm, make sure to first put on your hazmat suits. Even a double-dose of Tamiflu will be rendered useless by the ferocity of this disease.

In their delirium, the feverishly infected have forgotten that impeachment is not a legal or moral matter but strictly one of congressional political majorities...Yet, here we go again with another in a never-ending series of self-parodying minuets, an umpteenth dance by a gaggle of anti-Bush forces intent on doing everything they can to get rid of him except the one guaranteed thing that really works — winning elections. You win those elections by building new majorities and not by humoring yourself with emotionally satisfying but politically impossible fantasies.

...In the dire political circumstances we face, the only thing I find more depressing, more maddening than walking into a Young Republican convention, is schlepping to one more forum, one more panel discussion, one more prayer-meeting-like convocation of Outraged Liberals who piss away a Tuesday or Wednesday night by mightily concurring with each other about the horror, the horror of it all.

Why not try, for once, what Al Gore has started doing? Why not show the courage and the initiative to go out there and talk to all those other people who might not agree with you? Go, Al, go (gulp).

Yes, as you'll see in Cooper's column, Gore has confronted opponents. but his issues - domestic surveillance and global warming - aren't really winners: in fact, they're part and parcel of the losing Democratic strategy in presidential elections.

Economic growth, strong families, national security and defecit-cutting are the kinds of issues any successful Democratic presidential candidate will have to speak to, convincingly.

TECHNORATI TAGS: BUSH, IMPEACHMENT, DEMOCRATS, 2008, GORE

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 19, 2006 08:38 AM

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