OK to be cynical; not OK to be flat-out dumb.

A blogger named olvlzl, writing at Echidne of the Snakes this morning, offers an interesting post concerning Barney Frank's recent speech to the National Press Club - and then tacks on this particularly mindless bit of drivel:

Too bad [Franks] comes from the party that hasn’t had any ideas for the past sixty years.

Sixty years? That'd put us back to the end of WWII, wouldn't it?

Let's see. Leaving out Harry Truman (who had a few ideas of his own), among lots of other things...

• JFK established the Peace Corps and proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He backed an abortive invasion of Cuba and got the US into Vietnam, authorizing the use of napalm, defoliants, and free-fire zones. He funded the Apollo Project and started US astronauts on the way to the moon.
• Johnson instituted Medicare and Medicaid, backed the Voting Rights Act, and set up the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He conducted a “War on Poverty” and disastrously escalated in Vietnam.
• Carter’s administration saw the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaty, Salt II, and deregulation of the trucking, airline, rail, finance, communications, and oil industries. Carter committed the US to opposing the USSR in Afghanistan and famously failed in an attempt to rescue hostages in Iran.
• Clinton created AmeriCorps, attempted (and botched) a national health care plan, ended “welfare as we knew it,” proposed NAFTA, and initiated negotiations on GATT. And signed a whole lot of really lousy laws, helping to set the stage for the Bushco debacle.
  

They might not have all been good ideas - in fact, some of them were notorious stinkers - but they sure as hell were ideas. And the Democratics may have a whole lot to answer for, but saying they’ve had no ideas is neither helpful nor correct.