Oh, I'm not saying the democrats shouldn't fight for what's right. I'm just saying that, as a whole, at least trying to understand where the Republican *citizens* are coming from is a helpful exercise. Republican politicians? Should be fought tooth and nail.

And although you make good arguments to the contrary, I still honestly do believe that the divisiveness and hyper-partisanship (Edit: the parts of it that were created by the republicans) really did get us into this mess in the first place. The republican party, to achieve its more traditional aims, perpetuated a false dichotomy, starting way back in the "moral majority" days and leading up to today, deliberately fueling fires and drawing imaginary lines in the sand, just to position themselves as being somehow morally superior and thus electable. I believe many of the truly bad things that the Republican party did were a direct result of this strategizing and weren't necessarily because those things needed to get done. For example, I believe one of the reasons the war in Iraq was started was simply because the Republican party wanted yet another rallying cry.

Admittedly, without the deliberate partisanship, a lot of the crap would have still happened. I think there's a lot more crap and worse crap because of their twisting of the party's goals just to strategize the next election. I'm glad to see it finally backfired on them.