Daily Beast Says Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson are "Progressives."

I’m frustrated. No matter how whacky this blog gets, I can never compete with the whacky elite on the better known political blogs. There’s a jack-wad on “The Daily Beast” named Peter Beinart who thinks America is lucky to have a president who is politically to the right of hard-core Marxist ideologues.

“There are vibrant progressive organizations, from Moveon.org to SEIU, but they are part of the Democratic Party; there is no powerful grassroots movement that stands outside the two-party system calling for revolutionary change. No one believes, as many did in the mid-1930s and mid-1960s, that if presidential reform fails, blood will spill in the streets. From Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, American progressivism has historically occupied what Arthur Schlesinger famously called “the vital center,” a bulwark against the anti-democratic ideologies of both left and right. Except that today, powerful left-wing ideologies barely exist, and so large numbers of Americans can genuinely believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, if not a totalitarian. Luckily for them, and unluckily for progressives who want dramatic change, America no longer features the real thing.”

Oh, pity! My, aren’t we lucky? And he homogenizes presidents like TR, FDR and LBJ into one generalized term while waving the flag of “progressivism.” Teddy Roosevelt? LBJ? Progressives? One can only imagine the howling and whining there would be if today’s SEIU, “progressive” Democrats, the New Black Panther Party, the CAIR would have TR or LBJ as president instead of the current Crybaby-In-Chief.