2003-04-09T06:30:00.000-07:00

In response to criticism from an old law school colleague, I drafted the following mission statement for Bureaucrat by Day:

Age brings some people to the middle; others, it pushes to the edge. As it becomes clear to me, you simply don't understand the role that passion on the edge plays, and the role of this page to encourage it.

With all due respect, I'm not a journalist. My job here isn't to provide facts and draw inferences from those facts in a measured presentation. I do that enough as an attorney.

The facts are out there. I link to articles that do the research, put forth the facts, and tell the truth. And, I don't purport to speak anything but opinion, unlike a Drudge, O'Reilly, or Barr, who spout untruth and call it solemn fact.

My job here is merely to say what I feel. What my heart tells me. What's moral, and what's right. We liberals, for too long, have lived in worlds of nuance, worlds where we view every argument in shades of grey. Having done so is a testament to the intellectual base of our movement, and to the fact that we approach the world with an open mind, cognizant that debate is good, and that the world often isn't easily categorized.

But, we liberals have ceded the dialogue of morality -- of outrage -- to conservatives. And that's wrong. Because, as I said in a post today, we've got a lot to be angry about. Invective aside, the current administration has been a disaster for Americans: We've squandered our international reputation, showed a disdain for the international institutions we labored to build, erased our budgetary surplus, amassed a huge deficit to support unnecessary tax cuts that favor the wealthy, shamelessly used the tragedy of September 11 to justify an unprecedented invasion of civil liberties, abandoned our support for environmental protections, and begun labeling citizens who have the courage to dissent "anti-american." The last two years have been a tragedy for our nation, and we should be furious.

And we should tell people how furious we are. Conservatives think they've cornered the market on anger. On self-righteousness. On indignancy. But they haven't. The more of us progressives who express our outrage, the more we bring the debate back to the real center, where it belongs. Our job -- all of our jobs, even SUV driving Baltimore liberals -- is to let the administration know how upset we are. To let them know there's another voice out there, beyond the tepid mainstream media. That there's a grassroots movement that's unhappy with what's become of the country we love so much. And to let other people know that it's okay to dissent, passionately, loudly, angrily.

The nuanced Fred still exists. He's still here. But the time for reasoned Lincoln-Douglas debates with pro- and con- is past. It's a time for anger, excitement, and passion. And this blog is the perfect place to do so. As I have written before, blogs are the new broadsheets. So, I'll continue to get excited, to present links with articles and opinions, and attempt to get you worked up. If you disagree with my stridency, write a comment that substantively addresses how I'm wrong. But I'm going to keep poking. Because poking makes people think. Makes you read the articles I link to and think about whether they're right or wrong. And, if you're still the same progressive you were, it makes you say, "maybe Fred's gone too far, but I can see why he's so angry." And that's enough to get a movement rolling.

Bureaucrat by Day's Mission Statement

Bureaucrat by Day's
Mission Statement