Up for Adoption: Brass Balls

So, Steve Gilliard criticizes Armstrong Williams in what can only be described as a rather cheeky way. Ahem. Somehow, National Review's Jonah Goldberg gets a hold of Gilliard's condemnation and, in response, calls Gilliard a racist, not realizing that Gilliard himself is black. Upon being informed of said fact, a reasonable person with even the slightest scrap of self-awareness might retract his original statement and issue an apology. But Goldberg is not a reasonable person, or a wise person, or a smart person, so, with the temerity unique to conservatives that allows them to presume a blogger is white yet somehow fail to acknowledge the racism of such an assumption, he responds thusly. It goes back and forth a bit more, Glenn Reynolds (or Instacracker, as Gilliard amusingly refers to him, also jumping into the fray).

Which brings me to Gilliard's post today, in which he writes:

What stunned me with the trolls was the idea that they could call me a racist and I would care. They came from NRO and Instapundit. I assumed that at best they were projecting. Conservatives make the assumption that liberals care what they think and will react to it.

[...]

I want conservatives to read this site and come away steaming. I don't want them to think they will like a word I will say here. I don't want them to think I will consider their opinions or viewpoints. I want them to think: boy he doesn't like conservatives and really, really doesn't care what we say.

I'm tired of people acting like these people can be reasoned with or talked to. They don't want to talk, they want to drive us away into a corner and ridicule our ideas.

I'm not writing to make conservatives happy. I want them to hate my opinions. I'm not interested in debating them. I want to stop them.

Brilliant, is it not? So simple, and yet so frustratingly disparate from the attitude we see from our elected Democratic representatives.

Gilliard is speaking about a particular issue here, but he has concisely outlined the very philosophy that the Dems should adopt and apply to every issue that comes before them. Centrism will not swing conservative voters into the Democratic fold, and the Republicans have repeatedly proven that they are congenitally resistant to reasoned discourse or compromise, yet the Dems are inexplicably reluctant to adopt such a firm stance. The time has passed for believing that how you play the game is more important than winning the game. I'm not suggesting we become the cheating, unethical, lying, opportunistic scoundrels that currently hold court in D.C., but we can't continue to treat such despicable bastards with respect, expecting to somehow win on integrity alone, either.