Required reading…

…for the "spineless Ds in disarray" crowd. Amy Sullivan can drive me nuts with her kinder, gentler, liberal theocracy rap, but this time she's done her homework and when she's right I'm happy to say so. She takes a look at what Congressional Democrats have been up to, and how much they've accomplished, and blows a lot of the popular criticism (from both sides of the spectrum) right out of the water. For instance, remember the Slaughter memo brouhaha that prompted a lot of the latest round of Nancy bashing?

...the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) issued a crowing press release claiming that Nancy Pelosi had removed Slaughter's report from her leadership website because of GOP pressure. Staff for both Slaughter and Pelosi got a chuckle out of the release because they knew the website simply automatically rotated the items featured on the homepage. But liberal bloggers jumped at the bait. To them, it was proof of Democratic cowardice. Using the NRCC release as his source, Matt Stoller at MyDD.com complained about Democratic “knuckling-under.” David Sirota went further, writing: “[T]he House Democratic Leadership publicly pee[d] down its leg in knee-shaking fright, removing a major report on Republican corruption from its website. Why? Because they feared the GOP would yell at them about it.”

That's the kind of thing that can happen when we let them tell us what we're up to. That, and this...

So it is that Democrats can be “hopelessly divided” while voting together 88 percent of the time, according to Congressional Quarterly; just one percentage point lower than the vaunted lock-step Republican caucus. They can be “pathetically ineffective” while dealing a humiliating defeat to the president's biggest domestic policy effort. They can be deemed “weak” and “timid” while setting the terms of the debate for pulling troops out of Iraq.

And Amy's right about the remedy...

It seems the only way this particular narrative is going to change is with a Democratic victory in November.

Good to see she's got her eyes on the prize.