I don't usually read the WAPO much. A few articles here or there maybe. But this opinion piece by Sally Kohn caught my attention.  She posses the question, are liberals tolerance their undoing ?

What is the problem here? Is it a lack of leadership from the White House, a failure to out-mobilize the tea party or not enough long-term investment from liberal donors?

The real problem isn’t a liberal weakness. It’s something liberals have proudly seen as a strength — our deep-seated dedication to tolerance. In any given fight, tolerance is benevolent, while intolerance gets in the good punches. Tolerance plays by the rules, while intolerance fights dirty. The result is round after round of knockouts against liberals who think they’re high and mighty for being open-minded but who, politically and ideologically, are simply suckers.

Well that leaves me out, I guess. I fight to win and am not particularly concerned about the method. I'm not Japanese. Saving face of my opponent is not high on my list or objectives.
But I digress.

Dissecting Obama’s negotiation strategy in the budget fight, Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, “It looks from here as if the president’s idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making pre-emptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiation with the G.O.P., leading to further concessions.” The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein has criticized Obama for similarly failing to take a strong position on energy policy. But perhaps the president is only playing out the psychological tendencies of his base.

In the weeks leading up to the budget showdown, the Pew Research Center found that 50 percent of Republicans wanted their elected representatives to “stand by their principles,” even if it meant causing the federal government to shut down. Among those who identified as tea party supporters, that figure was 68 percent. Conversely, 69 percent of Democrats wanted their representatives to avoid a shutdown, even if it meant compromising on principles. With supporters like that, who needs Rand Paul?

Political tolerance is supposed to be essential to the great democratic experiment that is the United States. As Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, those who might wish to dissolve the newly established union should be left “undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

But some errors, by their nature, undermine reason.

Writing in 1945, philosopher Karl Popper called this the “paradox of tolerance” — that unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance altogether. To put the current political climate in Popper’s terms, if liberals are not willing to defend against the rigid demands of their political opponents, who are emboldened by their own unwavering opinions, their full range of open-minded positions will be destroyed. Liberals are neutered by their own tolerance.

Well except between themselves, if what I read here and elsewhere is any indication.

In fact, to many scholars of race and sexuality, “tolerance” is a dirty word. For instance, in his book “Signs of Struggle: The Rhetorical Politics of Cultural Difference,” Thomas R. West notes that tolerance is often used in a pejorative way to make excuses for inequalities in power. West makes the same critique of negotiation: When fundamental rights and core values are on the table, just talking about negotiating means you’ve already lost.

It would be one thing if Republicans were negotiating in good faith, recognizing that reasonable minds can disagree on the matters at hand and that each will have to bend. But the GOP has become so extremist that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) made clear after the 2010 elections that his party’s agenda for the next two years was not governing but ensuring Obama’s defeat in 2012. Meanwhile, as they have for years, Republicans have openly shared their desire to shrink government so much that they can, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once promised, “drown it in a bathtub.” Democrats’ tolerance of such destructive positions is a sign not of nobility but of pathetic self-loathing.

I quite agree here. Tolerance is one thing but being a pathetic masochist is something else.

Had liberals more fiercely fought for the role of government as the spender of last resort in a recession — and for the role of government in general for the past three decades — Congress would instead be debating how to invest public money in the new American economy.

Instead, tolerant Democrats are not only capitulating to negotiations over how much to starve our economy of public capital but in some cases are bragging about how much they’re giving in. During his remarks about the budget deal a week ago, Obama twice trumpeted achieving the biggest annual spending cuts in history. How can a basketball fanatic like Obama think that throwing the ball in the other team’s hoop will somehow win the game?

Yet, this is the essence of what Obama, the community organizer, came to Washington to do: not to push an agenda but to change the culture of the capital to be more inclusive, open-minded, civil and democratic. Unfortunately, there are no points for playing nice.

As they say nice guys finish last. So maybe you don't throw the first punch when the bully arives on the playground. But when you do hit back make damn sure he gets the living crap punch out of him.

There is a time for tolerance and compromise, but if the GOP is always dictating when that time is, Democrats have already lost. Suckers.

Damn straight.