Embrace Rick Warren

Perhaps these last 8 years, then, were simply an instance of us, the progressives, simply failing to view the circumstances in proper perspective.Which is to say, when presented with the lemons of the Bush presidency, the responsibility lay with us to get with the lemonade making.I mean, the guy provided more relief to Africa than any other president and if there were conditional strings of abstinence-only provisions, we should have kept mum and embraces the area in which our Venn Diagrams overlapped.There are some instances where being in the “minority” does not mean that you put your hands up and say, “Hey, let’s agree to disagree (but you win.)”People who wanted to integrate schools in the south were also in the minority.Obama had said, many times, during his campaign, that he would be open to and expecting vigorous input from his constituency; that he expected his feet be held to the fire by those who supported him.If standing up for an oppressed minority’s rights to basic pursuit of happiness is not an instance where we should be vocal in our dissent about his seemingly over-conciliatory gestures to the right (ostensibly for some farther off time, never made explicitly clear, when he’s REALLY gonna cash in those chips for something good), then I honestly don’t know what is.We just had, since 2001, a presidency wherein the people were told, “Now, with so much IMPORTANT and DANGEROUS things afoot, is not a time to make a fuss over “small” issues or differences. Line up.”We saw how that went. We shouldn’t allow even the shadow of it in our own party, I think.This guy is a bigot, plain and simple. Employing only a BIT of hyperbole, it would be like hanging a John Wayne Gacy original painting in the lobby of a YMCA, asking the members to embrace where the artistic merits of the work and find where they have common ground with the themes of the art.Or asking someone, at their wedding, to allow the uncle who groped them when they were kids, to say a few words, because, hey, at the end of the day, we’re FAMILY, and despite the groping, he’s usually a fun guy and he helped grandma out that time before and isn’t all that more important than something “small” that happened a while ago? Aren’t you being small making an issue of that divisive topic on this most important day?The analogy is brought to a seeming extreme for the purposes of clarity, but honestly, not too much. The guy is a homo-bigot. Were you so accommodating to Lieberman with Hagee?(ps. Please know I agree with you and have given numerous silent “Right ons!” in a bajillion other posts. I feel bad that the 2 I’ve responded to recently have been where I’m all counterpointy.)

Yeah, shunning bigots- what a terrible thing to do.(c&p from OpenLeft)Rewarding them seems a much better idea! Jails to amusement parks! Tax the poor! Up is down! Where people throw ducks at balloons and nothing is as it seems.

Nano is right, and Josh D. is even more spot on. Sorry, Lee, you are still in kool-aid mode if you think there’s a way to spin this. Bad decision by Obama. He’s made ‘em before (see, FISA over the Summer). You may not need anger, but some people do (see, e.g., Capt. Kirk in Star Trek V, he needed his pain). Negative emotions can keep the fires burning in a positive way. Now I have to go all Ricky Bobby on you: “Does that blow your mind? ‘Cause that just happened!” The real tragedy lost on all of this topic is all the energy we’re spending here means more distraction from the fantasy of prosecuting actual war criminals. We’re so desensitized.