It is Labor Day weekend.

We are fortunate to live in historic times: the climactic moments when we finally achieved the progressive changes in American health care long sought by Roosevelt, Kennedy and generations of progressive activists, including deep ranks of departed miners, nurses, truckers, waitresses, janitors and school teachers with no names; with beaten, unhealed bodies; with stout hearts.

And at this very moment in history, Barack Obama and the progressive majority of the Democratic Party need to realize that a principled and dignified defeat in the health care struggle might be even better for the long term prospects of progressive change than a victory, so we should roll the dice on the full progressive plan with a robust public option.  Let the Blue Dogs make good on their threat to vote against the bill, if they dare.  Let it go down if it must.  Then let Nelson, Bayh, Conrad, Lincoln and Landrieu spend a year out in the cold and under the media microscope as the friendless Democratic traitors who killed health reform in America. Let them be forced to confront the the massive influx of out-of-state money and national partisan activism on behalf of their new primary challengers. Let us keep a list of every uninsured child who dies from inadequate care, and call them the Blue Dogged Kids. Let us make up bumper stickers and tee shirts for uninsured, inadequately insured and exorbitantly insured Americans that say "Bark, if your livin' in the Blue Dog house."

It's time to get serious about party discipline. These Blue Dog Dems have way more bark than bite. President Obama has to realize that he has a winning hand here, if only he calls the bluff.  Obama might regret the fact that he has to choose a defined side in this fight, and abandon his wonted approach of bringing people together on the sensible middle ground of common sense and progress.  But the millions of Americans who need robust health care reform can tell him the same thing he says his mother used to tell him: "This is no fun for us either, buster."

The middle in this case lacks common sense, and is the enemy of progress.  They stand ignorantly for power and backwardness.  They don't serve the many and the common good; they serve other masters.  And standing up and fighting in this situation will actually enhance Obama's ability to achieve consensus later.  Both his friends and enemies will be forced to respect his determination and leadership, understand the location of his heart and principles, and recognize that they cannot always get what they want if they just push hard enough; if they just threaten him; if they just demean him.

We know what his enemies think.  They treat him like an illegitimate bastard president, a mixed-race mongrel too unclean even to address Americans' schoolchldren.   They openly challenge his birthright, demean his ancestry and insult his religious convictions.  They dishonor the mother who raised a boy to become President of the United States.

They buy guns and show sniveling, hostile contempt for the democratic rights of every American who voted for him.  But it's Labor Day weekend, the time for workers.  And we are still working, with no fear.

Now is the perfect opportunity to go for the vigorous progressive change on health care we have been working for these many years.   We have the president; we have the large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.  How long can those be expected to last?   I believe it is a mistake to think that if the reform effort fails this year that will sacrifice or weaken the chance for reform in the future. Reform is overwhelmingly popular. If it loses, the blame will fall very heavily on those who killed it. The bills will come right back again next year, if not sooner, maybe even more strongly progressive ones. And the obstructionists will have spent months going through the political wringer, and will by then be begging to vote for robust reform.

For Obama's sake, he needs to get on the right side of this movement, with vigor and fighting spirit, so that win or lose this session he is seen as the people's champion of progress and not just part of the Washington problem.  He needs to put his opponents on notice:  If he loses this time, he will bring this reform effort back again and again and again, until he wins.  And each time he brings it back, the political situation will get more dire for those opponents, and for the powerful interests they serve.

The very worst thing he can do is communicate to the opposition that he is desperate for a bill. If he does that, they have him.  His message to the centrists should instead be, "Make my day."

This is one of those defining moments for Barack Obama, the kind of moment we all face. He needs to choose a side, cast the die, and then throw his heart into the cause he has chosen. The tumblers are all lined up. He only needs to throw open the door. He needs to ride up to Congress next week, cast off the gloom of this recession-ridden and compromise-riddled first year, raise his voice and shake a chamber still hissing with the cowardly smears and threats of militant reaction and bigotry, and seize the leadership of a new era of resolute progressive change. If he does that, he will find a powerful army behind him, one that is just waiting for its leader to arrive.

He might also ask himself this Labor Day weekend: what would his mother have wanted him to do?

[Surgeon General's warning: the following post is blunt, rude and abrasive, and could be considered hurtful to those with tender feelings.]

Once again, an argument has been started in the TPM Cafe Reader Posts section over a post from a relatively unknown contributor shooting to the top of the Recommended Posts list.  I don't know what is responsible for these strange leaps to the top of the list. Perhaps some of these writers have signed up with publicists or blog promoters who employ spamming and recommendation techniques that the authors themselves might not realize are being employed on their behalf. On the other hand, there are many, many users at TPM Cafe, and most of them don't post here frequently, if ever, or follow the dominant cliques around. So maybe they comprise a silent majority whose tastes, and occasional presses of the "recommend" button, diverge from those of the more prominent regulars.

Anyway, the relatively few cases of a random post here or there rising to the top of the Recommended Posts list through recommendations-gaming, if that's what it is, are <i>not at all</i> the most pressing problem with the Reader Posts section. Most of the posts that rise to the top at this site are instead from a relatively small clique of posters who are all apparently either unemployed or retired, who have formed a self-selected community of group huggers, and who appear to have mountains of time to spend hanging out here and recommending each other's posts reflexively, no matter how trivial, inconsequential, mawkish or self-indulgent the posts might be. The site is now cluttered with these soft, rambling and introspective finger-paintings and exercises in mutual flattery and banal sentimentality.  And the recommendations system offers no way to discourage these kinds of posts in a gentle way, and that unfortunately necessitates a more overtly critical post such as this one.

TPM Cafe's reader post section is now very word-rich but information-poor. People whose chief concern is the exchange of information and informed debate on public policy questions, and who might hope to find serious contributions here from well-informed people, are now faced with a mountain of clutter. The level of policy discussion is even worse than what one finds on the cable news, and dramatically lower than what one finds in the other, hypocritically despised print and broadcast sources of the MSM.

In addition to the indiscriminate recommending of everything written by their friends, the members of the maudlin ruling clique stuff the comments sections with long stings of fatuous "way to go!"'s and "great jobs!"'s of the kind mothers typically hand out to their infant children when the latter make a nice poo-poo in the potty chair. They decline to engage in any serious critical examination of the content whatsoever. I guess critical thinking and vigorous intellectual challenge are considered too mean and threatening to be tolerated. When criticism does occur, it generally occasions little but hypersensitive temper-tantrums and flaming. I have personally sometimes refrained from posting things here because I can no longer stand to be treated like a child with silly little pats on the back.

The posts on political issues that prove most popular generally steer clear of informed discussion of policy debates, and are instead repetitive meta-discussions on such immortal themes as:

Why are Republicans so stupid and crazy when they talk about so-and-so?

Glenn Beck is crazy.

Michael Savage is crazy.

Republicans make me depressed.

Bernie Madoff is evil and still in jail.

Follow this link to read this crazy Republican saying stupid and scary things!

I watch FOX all the time and then come here to talk about how crazy they are.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Republicans are a minority but they dominate my life.

My daddy was a Republican but I still love him.

Simultaneously wallowing in and complaining about ignorant Republican rants helps me feel better about how little I know and how intellectually lazy I am.

Why do some of these other posters say so many things I disagree with? The trolls are harshing my buzz!

... and other topics of this exhausted and well-mined genre. They typically offer little to the substantive part of the national discussion of policy.

For many months this dumbing-down, sentimentalization and debasement of the discussion in the reader section has marginalized more serious discussion on the site, discouraged the vigorous exercise of critical thinking, and created a culture of indulgence and emotionalism that is something like a cross between a kindergarten class, a support group and a lonely hearts internet chat room. But these watery and moonstruck weepers stamp their little feet tyrannically and squawk the loudest when some interloper barges in on their territory and rises to the top of the recommended list without their permission.

It's not that there aren't many smart and interesting people contributing to the Cafe on occasion.  But the reigning culture of sentiment, confession, raillery and subjectivity discourages them from producing their best stuff.   Why do a few days worth of homework, get one's facts and numbers and arguments straight, and then post a sober, no-nonsense post on regulatory reform of the financial industry, or trade relations with China, or the structure of the defense budget, or tax policy as it relates to health care, or military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only to see that kind of content sink quickly to the bottom?  Since such posts are rarely rewarded by the people who rule the roost, and who are in love with the recommend button and each other, many of the best thinkers here probably ask, "Why bother?"

I am dismayed that the management has implemented neglectful policies that have allowed the site to degenerate in this embarrassing fashion, and have prevented it from achieving anything close to the public service potential it once appeared to have. TPM Cafe has become part of the problem, not part of the solution. It is filled with self-indulgent writers spinning their wheels without going anywhere, complaining about their enemies' ignorance without contributing anything of substance themselves, and getting lost in unproductive and hyper-reflexive navel gazing. TPM Cafe's readers section has lately contributed very little of substance to the advancement of progress and genuine understanding in health care policy, financial regulation policy, national security policy, education policy, budget policy, industrial policy, energy policy or other policy areas. If the substance is there, it is buried and hard to find, like a good book buried beneath a pile of tchotchkes and gee-gaws at a yard sale. There are a few writers on the left-hand side of the screen who are contributing real knowledge and advancing understanding of hard issues, but the right-hand side of the screen is a can't-do ghetto of mopey whiners and ill-informed ranters, and the two halves are working against each other: one half tries to smarten people up and empower them with knowledge, the other half works to dumb them down and cripple them with indulgent encouragement of weakness and self-preoccupation.

Now I know some people must think I am terribly mean and arrogant to say these things.  Maybe I am mean and maybe I am arrogant, and maybe I am all alone in my perceptions. But I suspect not. I also suspect that many others who visit this site think the same things, but are reluctant to challenge the status quo of majority-approved bed-wetting and "I LOVE you man!" stroking and fondling.  Since the writers in the back-patting clique present themselves as a bunch of sensitive and depressed sad sacks, maybe others are afraid to criticize them lest they send these writers off into a spiral of over-drinking, over-eating or binge blubbering. Yet I have a feeling that if management employed a different sort of system for recommending, discouraging and editorially approving posts, they might find that there is a large untapped audience of people craving knowledge and eager to discuss policy nuts and bolts at a higher level. The editorial tolerance for the ascendancy of bawling esteem-cravers and their self-indulgent antics is disempowering and enfeebling the "progressive" movement - at least the corner of it that appears here.

Frankly, I believe this reckless lack of editorial direction by the TPM management is a cynical attempt to attract eyeballs to the advertising on the site by permitting whatever forms of mutually titillating gibberish the readers want to distract each other with.  The sell-out is apparent all over.  Personally, I find TPM Café to have the slowest page-load of any site I visit on the internet, <i>bar none</i>, and I suspect that's mainly due to the barrage of flashing, popping and scrolling advertising crap one has to swim through to visit this site.

The upshot is an irresponsible failure of civic and public responsibility.  Josh and company should be truly ashamed of what they have done here, whether the sad outcome is a result of sins of commission or omission.  I understand that Josh actually has a PhD in history from Brown University. How can he associate himself with this rot?  Like it or not, Josh is now Citizen Marshall, and he has a civic responsibility to use the influence he has acquired to raise the level of public discourse, not pimp for infotainment and mediocrity.

If I'm wrong, let me have it.  But if you agree with me, please speak up in support.