Blue America Welcomes Back One Of Our Most Cherished Friends, DARCY!

Today at 11am (PT), Digby will be leading a live-blogging session at Crooks and Liars with Darcy Burner, Blue America's favorite Washingtonian-- the gorgeous state up north, not the cesspool back East. So below is mostly the Blue America letter Digby wrote that we sent out to all our members yesterday. Except for the parts where you hear a whip cracking. Those are some insertions for DWT readers only. [We don't want to scare normal people.]

Every once in a while a righteous cause rises to the surface of our political consciousness at  the moment the right politician is ready to lead it. It doesn't happen very often, but it's happening right now. That cause is the fight against the national right wing assault on women, and the leader is Darcy Burner, running for congress in Washington's newly drawn first congressional district, which stretches from the suburbs east of Seattle all the way up through Bellingham and beyond to the Canadian border.

A week ago, at the Netroots nation gathering in Providence Rhode Island, Darcy gave a rousing Keynote speech to several thousand attendees. She presented them with a plan for progressive power. And she asked that women, in particular, empower themselves and inspire those around them to do the same.  She did this by pointing out that this reckless war on women was not election year rhetoric, that the takeover of state houses all over the country and the US Congress in 2010 has resulted in attempts to roll back paycheck equality, access to contraception and most especially abortion rights.

She reminded the crowd that 1/3 of all adult women will have an abortion in their lifetimes. And then she did something very bold: she asked all the women who'd had abortions to stand. And they did. One by one at first, and finally all at once, women throughout that huge crowd, in front of all their peers and friends, stood up. That's not an easy thing to do in this culture, even among friends. The right has made it a dishonorable, solitary act, borne in silence, subject to fear and social stigma. 

So Darcy took the next step: she asked all of those who supported  those women to stand up. Everyone in the  room came to their feet. There was no sustained applause and no celebration, just a simple public acknowledgment of solidarity and sincere support for the women in all of our  lives who have made this choice and are no longer willing to be shamed for making it.

This is the essence of leadership-- a candidate for office taking a stand on one of the most contentious issues of our time, reminding the people of what they have in common, empowering those who need to be empowered and asking for solidarity from their friends and neighbors.

This is Darcy.

Naturally, she is being vilified for it. That's what happens to people who challenge the status-quo. It's certainly to be expected from the retrograde right wing. Unfortunately, her so-called "progressive" primary opponent is staging a whisper campaign in the district as well, alleging that she led "cheers" for abortion and portraying her as an extremist for illustrating that abortion is not a disgraceful choice made by a small number of irresponsible women but  rather  a common, everyday part of the lives of our mothers, daughters, friends and wives. The local press is eating it up. A Seattle political operative, Sandeep Kaushik, who tried unsuccessfully to turn Darcy against her netroots supports in 2008-- and who tried to sabotage her campaign-- is now working for Suzan DelBene and is the source of the smear campaign and the ugly insinuations that Darcy was asking people to cheer abortions. DelBene hasn't fired him, which says an awful lot about her character.

Darcy needs our help.

She is a leader on many issues, from the war in Afghanistan to economic fairness. But on this, she has done something that no other Democrat has done-- she has attempted to redefine the battle lines on women's reproductive rights.  And until the Democratic Party follows her lead, women's rights will continue to be whittled away in bits and pieces all over the country until one day we will find that more than 50 million of our people will have been denied the right to decide their own futures, take care of their families and otherwise be full and equal citizens.

Instead we get Democratic Party operatives, like sleazy New Dem vice-chair Rick Larsen calling up Darcy's donors and telling them to stop giving her money. New Dems and Blue Dogs would rather see Republicans win than progressives. They're a real cancer inside the Democratic caucus. Please join us at 11 at Crooks and Liars for a live chat with Darcy about this issue. And please donate what you can to her campaign. If we let them destroy her, it will send a message to all other progressive politicians that they must not challenge the prevailing, cowardly orthodoxy on abortion rights. We cannot let that happen.