...the difference in the world between when Conservatives are doing and what Liberals are proposing.  The Republican Party is something like 92% far Right.  Every Repubican in Washington or governing a state (about 240 in total) other than about 10 of them (Crist, Schwartzenegger, Collins, Snowe, Castle, Voinivich, ...sometimes Hutchinson, ummmm...) not only cowers at the will of their base but fully embraces far Right dogma themselves.  Maybe 40% of elected Democrats (about 340 in total) are in reasonable line with mainstream Progressive ideals, and maybe 5% actually respond to concerns of the Green Party far Left.  In theory, our desire to purify the Democratic Leadership is not different from the Tea Partiers wanting to do the same to theirs, but in practice, it is the difference between wanting to dust an already spotless house to try to get just the last tiny bits of debris out, and wanting to build 2 more walls, a roof and a kitchen so that the structure _is_ a house.  What the Republicans are doing is laughable overkill, since Republicans already give 0% support to even the weakest, most Corporate-friendly, Conservative-compromised proposals.  What Liberals are trying to do is fighting for the smallest, most meager drops of influence among the halls of power.

  I don't boil anything down to a bumper sticker, certainly not one that is obviously counterproductive to the mission.  But this particular Democratic Party in Washington actually stands to do much greater damage to the cause of Liberalism than to help it.  I'd be _very_ happy with half a loaf if that was even close to what we were getting.