The right wing of the Left

Since most of the posts on District 5 Diary are critical of progressives and leftists, some readers assume I'm a right-winger. Just for the record, I'm a liberal and a registered Democrat. I'm pro-choice, pro-animal rights, an environmentalist, for racial integration, for women's rights, for gay rights, for gun control, and against capital punishment. Since 9/11, I've been a hawk in the war against Islamic fascism, though I disagree with the Bush administration on every other issue. I just wish they had been more skillful in carrying out the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As James Fallows and others have pointed out, the Bush Administration ignored plenty of prescient advice about what conditions would be like in post-invasion Iraq.

 

I'm particularly hard on the local left, because that's the dominant political tendency in San Francisco. In spite of fringe left rants about Downtown Interests, this city is ruled by the progressive left and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. There's a progressive majority on the board of supervisors, and the mayor is a San Francisco Democrat. The right-wing is miniscule-to-non-existent in the city. I think the city's liberal-left elite is wrong and/or delusional on a number of important issues, which you can see by scrolling through some of the other posts on this site.