What is to be Done?

Jay Ackroyd cites on Eschaton this excellent article, reminding us that Obama is operating in a far more constrained manner than he needs to, assuming he actually believes in left-liberal policies:

http://www.ianwelsh.net/what-could-obama-have-done-and-what-can-obama-still-do/

I agree with all the author's points, but would add one I consider, perhaps, the most important act Obama et al. could take, and which is sorely lacking: a sane, persistent, relentless, intelligent and vigorous defense of reality-based policy making, and the role of government in a civil society--'truth, justice and the American way', as once memorably phrased--against the ever more strident, crazed, intolerant, paranoid, reality-challenged opposition. A persistent refusal to allow such as Beck and the Tea Partiers to operate without consistent, forthright opposition, based on reality and conceding nothing, would, perhaps, in the long run, yield as much as anything else Obama could do, while enabling all else he'd like to do, or should want to do.

At the risk of repeating myself, I think that by far the most objectionable aspect of the Beck and Palin travesty in Washington was not their conduct, or that of their supporters, but the absence, for the most part, of any challenge to their legitimacy, there or elsewhere, from other Republicans, the media and, above, all, Democrats, who should seize the opportunity to stand for something better than dogmatic, narrow, ahistorical, paranoid, intolerant bullshit which has no chance at all of contributing anything positive to solving the nation's and the world's problems.