Mark Desrosiers, over at Cheek, linked to an eye opening article by Steve Perry and an even more eye opening letter (and reply) in response to the article. Both are a must read.

Spank the Donkey

However you parse the polls, there was never any popular mandate for the Democrats' right turn. If there had been, we would not see so many defections from an increasingly conservative Democratic party; we would not hear so much half-hearted apologia from beleaguered Democrats waiting vainly for the day when the party veers the other way again; and there would not be such a gigantic mass of people reduced to thinking of Democrats as the perennial "lesser evil"--that is to say, not what we the people want or need, but a little better than nothing. I am going to argue that the Democrats are not really a lesser evil, that their turn to Republican Lite in the past generation has been as cynical as it is deliberate. But for the moment let's take the lesser evil argument at face value and suppose that the courts and the human services bureaucracies do fare a little better (that is, erode more slowly) under Democrats. Is that "democracy" in any sense? Do you really think so little of your country and your citizenship as to accept that?
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Letter from Italy
When the politically obvious isn't obvious at all: An exchange

The basic difference between Europe (and Canada) and the States is, at a mass level, the lack of universal health care (at a moral level, capital punishment). Now my question is: Has America ever held a poll to check if every single American knows that every European/Canadian citizen has health care? How is it possible that a politician pushing for national health care on the Canadian model or the model of, say, France or Germany, doesn't win elections automatically? I mean any American politician might prove, with indisputable data in his own hands, that the Canadian/European models are the only ones truly providing health care for everybody (the Italian constitution itself says that every citizen has a right to health care), and that the only way to truly have universal health care is to have a strong government role and to mandate by law that every citizen must have health coverage.

So why is it that left-liberal politicians (however few they may be) don't bombard every American with the notion that in Europe and Canada, health care for everybody is just taken for granted? Why don't they bombard them with the fact that both the right and the left support it (Michael Moore did it in Bowling for Columbine, but it's such a rare voice), that it's a politically non-controversial point, just an obvious thing for civilized people! The only political differences may vary on how much citizens should receive from the health care system, but no one could dispute the fact that every single citizen should receive all basic medical needs and that such a fact must be recognized by law. Americans should be bombarded with facts like this: Even Margaret Thatcher (so close to Reagan) never dared touch the British national health service! Any European politician, even the conservative Berlusconi, would be politically dead if he pushed for the dreaded American profit-based system!
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Craig, at BookNotes, turned me on to these two links. Please pass them on.