THE DO-SOMETHING-BAD CONGRESS

Here's ostensibly uber-media-savvy Chuck Schumer making the case that the problem with Republicans in Congress is that they don't do anything:

"When they (Republicans) get up and read their litany, it's things that only a few narrow special interests care about, like a bankruptcy bill or class-action reform," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "Anything major that affects average Americans and makes their lives better, they haven't been able to get done, and I think people know that."

Granted, people like for Congress to do things. So when your opponents run the Congress, it makes sense to accuse them of not doing things. But with this Congress especially, which has done all kinds of no good very bad things, it's worth actually pointing out how bad those things are. Schumer is doing exactly the opposite. He's taking two awful pieces of legislation passed by our right-wing Congress at the bidding of right-wing special interests and at the expense of everybody else and he's suggesting that no one other than those special interests are affected. Conservatives have passed bills to make it harder for working Americans to lift themselves out of bankruptcy or to get just compensation for grievous corporate abuses, and Chuck Schumer doesn't find it worthwhile to make the case to the American people that these laws are bad - rather than distracting - for all of us. This is the same kind of silly rhetoric we hear all the time from national spokespeople for the Democratic party about how gay rights and women's rights aren't the kinds of issues that actually affect people. It's not an approach that seems to have sold too many people on the principled vision of the Democratic Party as of yet.