The courage of real progress

Here's the headline:

Analysis: Obama wants voters to remember Clinton's past

Here's what Obama said:

"'She has gone through this,' Obama said. 'I recall when, back in 1992, when she made a statement about how, what do you expect, should I be at home baking cookies? And people attacked her for being elitist and this and that. And I remember watching that on TV and saying, `Well, that's not who she is. That's not what she believes. That's not what she meant.'

'And I think Senator Clinton learned the wrong lesson from it because she's adopting the same tactics,' Obama said."

I guess it's always darkest before the dawn.

But it's fuckin' dark outside, right now. And I could use a little sunlight.

I don't know if I've ever seen so disappointed with my country as I am, right now. Everything about my country reeks of, "We do not deserve the power we seek," right now.

I guess I was naive, growing up, thinking that America was more worthy than this election is demonstrating. I think she's more worthy. I just think her ugliest instincts are overwhelming her most decent instincts, right now.

It doesn't have to be that way.

But it will take confidence in our strongest liberal democratic values to turn things around.

It's so strange watching a nation conceived in liberty angling so hard against its own founding values and the strongest values that America and the world has to offer, all so we don't have to face our cowardice to be better.

The kids and I have been studying the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence in U.S. History. It took so much courage for those Founding Fathers to take on the most powerful empire in the world, at the time, for liberty and independence.

You'd think we could dig deep and find some of that courage, right now.

I think we can.

Courage is not living without fear. Courage is doing the right thing in the face of fear.

I think we have that in us.

We ought to, given how America was conceived.