This guy is going to scare the Democratic establishment to death

My Deany-sense is going off big-time. Alan Grayson is a star -- a real progressive star. He doesn't give a shit about whether the Republicans' feelings are hurt or whether the insurance industry will start donating. $31 million of your own money will do that. Of course the usual reactionary wingnut churls will call him a hypocrite and ask why he doesn't use his own money to buy health insurance for others. After all, their hero, Eric Cantor, told a woman to have her cancer-stricken friend beg for charity. It's how Republicans think: I Got Mine and Fuck You. Alan Grayson should pay for health care. He should pay more than we do, because he has more than we do. It's called taxes. They're supposed to work FOR people, instead of for waging pointless wars in countries that did nothing to us.

Grayson is dangerous to the established order. He's dangerous because he's not a pretty, slick lawyer with a big toothy smile like John Edwards. He's dangerous because he's a smart Jewish guy from the Bronx; a zhlubby, stocky guy with bad taste in suits and an unrepaired gap in his teeth who looks like a Mob enforcer and sounds like the class wag. He appropriates Republican terms like "nattering nabobs of negativism" and turns them back on the obstructionists like a flaming turd. He's a master of the sound bite, but he's rough around the edges. The helmet-heads of the mainstream media; the Tweetys and the Stephanopouli, the Noonans and the Buchanans, the Scarboroughs and the Frums, will all have the vapors at his unpolished exterior, his sometimes duh-sounding voice that belies a mind like a steel trap, and his unabashed liberalism. And Grayson won't care. He doesn't have to. Grayson can go back to the Aliance for Aging Research (which he founded). He can go back to the practice of government contracts law and represent whistleblowers. But for our sake, we hope he doesn't have to. Because forget about the Republicans for a minute. We need Grayson to try to keep his own party honest -- a party populated by corporatist whores like Max Baucus and Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh -- and Rahm Emanuel. We need Grayson to stay there and MAKE them honest brokers. And I hope he learned from Howard Dean's experience in dealing with the hackocracy that when you are the embodiment of the party's conscience, you have to watch your back every stinkin' minute.

(Update for "Grayheads": Video from Grayson's Town Hall meeting, 10/12/09.)