People who can put aside partisanship and act for the GLBT movement should have begun boycotting the Democrats as a whole prior to the election. Some people are too invested in the Democrat Party to do that.

After Democrats won Congress in 2006 they obviously decided that the way to victory in 2008 was to turn the tables on Bush and grab his bigot base. The DNC discussed that long before the election. They distanced themselves from us as much as possible to do that.

• They gutted and dropped ENDA.

• They broke their promise to even try end the Clinton-Bush wars.

• They refused to even try to repeal DADT and DOMA.

• They passed hate crimes legislation and then quietly let it die.

Obama's campaign keyed in on grabbing the bigot vote and did very well.

• They cut every mention of us from their platform, they organized a nationwide 'faith' based (read bigot) base.

• They went out of their way to identify Obama’s campaign with hateful scum like Warren and McClurkin and refused to denounce them.

• Obama personally called out the bigots to pass Prop 8 and never denounced Yes on 8s use of “gawd’s in the mix” although he could easily have done so. He same the same inversion in the polls we did and did nothing. The loss in California is his responsibility.

• They used DNC donations to fund anti-choice and anti-GLBT bigots in the Democrat party.

There was no need to call in a panel of rocket scientists to figure out where things were going before November 4th. People who voted for Obama projecting their own emotions or ideas on him or believing him blundered. Badly.

Phil,

Deep breath please and then tell me that if DADT is asking us not to give to the Democratic Party and encouraging us to give to progressive candidates, if Obama himself has told us to our faces to "hold him accountable", how exactly are we bordering on the obscene by engaging in this action?

The thing I LIKE about this effort is that it is about the WHOLE Democratic Party organization. It is not saying:Don't give to Obama's reelection, it says: Don't give to a Party that sells you out.

You are conflating issues and I am beginning to smell a rank fear of being called a racist more than a reasoned argument for why we should not hold people accountable.

Note: I am not trying to be confrontational, I really do want to know how you reconcile these issues.

Hi Phil.

First of all you’re swimming against the tide and this one is very powerful. Proud and very angry UAW workers at Ford are resisting Obama’s union busting and taking a strike vote. The LGBT communities are starting to treat rotten politicians like we treat rotten Miss USA titlists – we’re gonna Bork ‘em (or should that be Prejean ‘em) and all the kings men and all the kings horses can’t do squat about it.

I’m glad you opened the Blue Doggies can of worms. It eats holes in your perspective of somehow reforming or using the Democrats to advance our agenda.

You blame Obama's right wing drift - by now a veritable stampede - on those 'right of right center' Blue Doggies. They’re political descendents of Dixiecrats like the Clintons, Strom Thurmond and Sam Nunn. Shades of George Wallace, the Dixiecrats long ago split into the DLC Democrat wing and some morphed effortlessly into Republicans. They changed their name because ‘Dixiecrat’ was closely linked with the KKK/southern baptist axis and homohaters like Rick Warren and racist preachers like Falwell and Robertson.

Here’s your problem Phil. ‘Liberals’ and 'progressives' have been in the same party as Dixiecrats/Blue Doggies for decades and have steadily lost ground to them. (Under threat of revolution they finally passed some necessary civil rights bills in the 60’s and ‘70’s but they didn’t begin to go far enough.) The coalition of Republicans, Dixiecrats, Blue Doggies and the DLC fought for and passed DOMA and DADT, fought for and passed deregulation of S&Ls under Carter Reagan and banks under Clinton and NAFTA under Clinton. They and most liberals vote for racist oil wars and support for zionist ethnic cleansing and apartheid under Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton and now Obama.

That right coalition fought for and passed TARP under amazing and unprecedented circumstances. In the last few days before TARP became law Congress was deluged with anti-TARP phone calls, faxes and emails. People aren't idiots and they recognized that TARP was grand theft on a scale never before seen in history. Then things got interesting. Inbound phone, fax and email lines were shut down while Obama and Bush tag teamed Congress, promising, lying, twisting elbows and doing what it took. TARP passed.

The rightist coalition rules the country, irrespective of party and who sits in the White House and it’s had the same politics since Truman’s time and been far more successful than not.

On paper Obama and the Democrats swept the states, Congress and the White House last fall and are as powerful as FDR and the Democrats in the '30's.

• So why are they busting unions.

• Why do they steal from the poor and give to the rich.

• Why do they prosecute racist wars for resources, murdering GI's and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, including thousands of GLBT folks singled out by their jihadist collaborators.

• Why won’ t Obama and Hillary Clinton declare open amnesty for GLBT victims of the killer ayatollahs and mullahs in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

• If they have the votes where is single payer or socialized medicine?

• Where is the Manhattan Project to end the HIV/AIDs plague?

• Why are DOMA and DADT on the books?

• Why haven’t they forgiven debt and ended foreclosure fraud, auto repos and credit card interest?

• Why are 15 million collecting unemployment compensation and why have millions more no longer eligible for unemployment compensation or working two trashy jobs to make do? Why are those figures growing by leaps and bounds instead of declining?

• Why did Biden, then the Senator from Bank of America ram his bank-friendly consumer-victimizing bankruptcy law through Congress and why haven’t they repealed it?

• Why are the rich getting incredibly rich and working people getting poorer and poorer?

Etc. (Make you own list.)

The answer to all those question is that the silly idea that the Democrats are anything but a rightwing party moving right is a myth. The Democrat Party is owned by the rich and does what they’re told to do and it’s beyond naive to think otherwise. Working in the Democrat party is self defeating. Boycotting them is fine, but what we really have to do is replace them.

I absolutely agree with you on all of your points Tom K. other than the fact that the worse thing that we could have done was to vote for him.

Just because the premise is ridiculous doesn't mean that the opposition wouldn't stoop to using it. Politics is a dirty game and it always has been that way.