...except that you're not supposed to build exactly the same house as any of your neighbors. At the very least, you better not use the same wallpaper.

..is that if the Sierra Club were to reject Chaffe just for being a Republican, then the Sierra Club would lose their credibility on the environment. People would rightly begin to regard the Sierra Club as being merely a partisan arm of the Democrats.

Furthermore, now Daily Kos loses their credibility on the environment as well. How can Daily Kos claim they care about the environment when obviously all they really care about is the partisan label?

Saying that Democrats are 'better' than Republicans on the environment just isn't a credible statement, given that there are plenty of Democrats who are not particularly good on the environment at all.

'Democrats good, Republicans bad,' just isn't a serious political platform. It's wrong on its face and voters see right through it. Democrats need to stand for something bigger than just being non-Republicans.

"The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats believe in conscious, planned efforts for the common good. "

No, Democrats don't believe that. Liberals might, but Democrats are just politicians. Politicians can only represent the people who vote for them, and those people may or may not believe in "conscious, planned efforts the for the common good." Democrats can only be as liberal as their voters are.

Thus if you're a liberal, you should vote for liberals. That will probably be Democrats most of the time. But if the Republican is more liberal than his Democratic opponent, then you should vote for the Republican. That makes the Republicans more liberal. Making the Republicans more liberal makes the country more liberal and eventually that ends up making the Democrats more liberal. Thus liberalism will be advanced and the country will move leftwards.

This simple minded partisan nitwittery of Daily Kos and other netroot morons is just not going to work out well. They are not going to win any votes by being boneheaded partisan bullies. So far, they haven't won anything yet.

It's stupid to be just for a party and not for a set of beliefs. Any party might sell out your beliefs any day just to get votes. Thus you better hold on to your beliefs, because your party isn't going to hold on to them for you.

One hundred Democrats in the Senate will get you NOTHING if those Democrats aren't particularly liberal. Yet this is what the partisans keep aiming for. This makes Daily Kos no better than the dumbest consultant hack in Washington, DC.

It would be better to have only ten Democrats in the Senate, rather than one hundred, as long as those ten Democrats were real liberals.

The Sierra Club and the LCV are absolutely correct to endorse any person they think furthers their beliefs. This gets their beliefs advanced far more than mindless partisanship ever will. Would that Daily Kos and other babbling netroots would ever learn the same lesson.

...since I'm reminded of another uncomfortable evening long ago: the night Mark Twain's hilarious takedown of Emerson, Longfellow and Holmes was met with shocked silence.

http://www.transcendentalists.com/twain_on_emerson.htm

Of course, Emerson, Longfellow and Holmes were in no way destroying America, but after Mark Twain and that evening, America was just a little bit different from before. It knew better what to laugh at after Twain. And I think that likewise America will be a little bit different after Colbert as well.

Here is a transcript of Colbert's evening:

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/30/1441/59811/

"...it offers you the experience of an intelligent young writer struggling to think for himself. As Niedzviecki is well aware, this is something that the culture of individualistic conformity has made obligatory, and thereby almost impossible."

This strikes me as nothing but a fancy apologia for not thinking for one's self.

If we really don't want to take charge of our own lives and our own minds, I guess we should just go on blaming the culture for who we are. But I think it's more true that the culture caters to us more than we cater to it. Far from being slaves of the culture, we form the culture more than it forms us. The problem is that many us just don't want to accept any responsiblity for the world we're living in.

What this article is really expressing is plain old libertarian ennui. The deadly and choking disease of the 'invisible hand' has many of us convinced that we are helpless to do anything about anything, from the war in Iraq to gas prices to the dreary and sullen suburbs that most of us live in. Since Americans seem to have a deep and innate fear of truly standing out in any way, many of us are happy to believe there's nothing we can do about anything, not even ourselves. We're happy to just float along and buy stuff from the malls, even to buy our own identities.

Opposed to this libertarian (and fundamentally conservative) notion of helplessness is the liberal notion that we can in fact make choices for ourselves, that we can make choices as individuals and we can make choices as a society and we can make choices through our own democratic government. Hence culture from the liberal point of view is seen as something that we create for ourselves rather than something that creates us.

Once we we are able to see our world as something for which we are responsible, then we can start to make changes and begin to make a better world. But if we're never going to be responsible for anything, not even for ourselves, then we'll never be able to change anything and we'll always remain powerless. Which is exactly what some important elements in this society would like us to always remain--powerless.