The impotence of the loyal partisan voter

By Glenn Greenwald

About that point, Rachel said this:

Only the base itself will ever change that.

fear of Sarah Palin, the Kochs and the Tea Party. Rachel herself made this point quite well before the 2010 election:

I talked at the top of the show tonight with Gail Collins about how one way to motivate your natural base for an election is to make your base afraid of what the other side has to offer. And that is true. That works. That works on both sides. It works for conservatives about liberals and it works for liberals about conservatives.

urged progressives not to organize for Obama until next year while nonetheless vowing to support his re-election, which (though well-intentioned) strikes me as merely reinforcing this dynamic. But what I do know is that Rachel’s optimistic proclamation that “only the base itself will ever change” this dynamic cannot be fulfilled without giving the Party and its leaders a true reason to pay attention or care about disenchantment (and, some day, to fear alienating their base). For those who are hopeful that this will happen, what do they envision will cause it? What would ever make Democratic Party leaders change how they view this dynamic?

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documented before — virtually every country that suffers horrible Terrorist attacks — Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia — tries the accused perpetrators in its regular court system, on their own soil, usually in the city that was attacked.  The U.S. — Land of the Free and Home of the Brave — stands alone in being too afraid to do so.

long before Congress acted to ban transfers of detainees to the U.S. — removed decision-making power from the DOJ in the KSM case and made clear it would likely reverse Holder’s decision.  As The Atlantic‘s Andrew Cohen notes:

The Congressional ban is the excuse, not the cause.

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