Unconditional surrender! By Eric Smith

Those who are unreasonable lose their right to expect others to be reasonable with them. Those who are intolerant lose their right to expect others to be tolerant of them. For years the Republican Party & the Far Right has flat out refused the pleas of President Obama and others on the Left to meet them halfway, to be reasonable and to work things out through genuine compromise where each side gives a little and gains a lot. It has always been their way or the highway; their way or nothing at all.

It is telling how after the debt limit standoff of 2011 Speaker John Boehner said "We got 98% of what we wanted." This is telling for this reason; Republicans/Conservatives define "compromise" as getting 95% to 98% of whatever they ask for. The problem is not so much that this is how these people really think but that we Democrats in general and we on the Left in particular have allowed them to get away with this way of thinking & attendant behavior for far too long; so long in fact that it would be unrealistic on our part to expect them to think any other way now.

We have historically caved, given in, whenever they have accused us of being unreasonable, of refusing to meet them "halfway" whenever we have refused to give them at least 90% of what they've asked for and I'm like what type of damn fools have we on the Left been?! Seriously, if the Republicans/Conservatives want to accuse us on the Left of being unreasonable or unwilling to meet them "halfway" because we and President Obama have finally come to our collective senses and realized that giving them 98% of what they want is not compromise but conquest, so what?

Let them scream, let them holler, let them throw all the tantrums they want but don't give another inch of ground. Compromise, real compromise, is a 50/50 split; it is straight down the middle and if they can't accept that then fine; we will be more than within our rights to demand 100% of what we want and not allow them to have anything because we have allowed them to get too much of what they've wanted for far too long. There comes a time when the only sane thing to do once you have your foot on an opponent's neck is not to lift it up but to keep pressing down on your opponent's neck until you feel that neck break.

That is where we on the Left stand in relation to the Far Right now. We must press our foot down on its neck until it breaks. Forget compromise, forget being reasonable; we must say to them what President Truman said to the Japanese in 1945 and that is that nothing less than "unconditional surrender" is acceptable at this point. We must mean it and we must act accordingly. Unconditional surrender is what we Democrats and those of us on the Left must demand of the Republican Party & the Far Right. Nothing else will do and in light of their history and current conduct, nothing less than unconditional surrender makes a damn bit of sense.