They know how to make the most of an Opportunity. They know how to rally their members.
AND Conservatives know how to boil down their Ideas into simple Talking Points, that they can easily repeat, and easily pawn off on their Independent friends, neighbors, and acquaintances.
Short, sweet, and to the point. Agree, or Disagree, one thing about Conservatives -- you always know where they stand. And you usually know Why, too.
As this year's Conservative Rally CPAC, winds to a close, some New Talking Points have emerged.
Question is, Will Dems sit idlely by, saying "Oh that's nice. Good for them," or will Dems take note, and respond forcefully, factually, and with good humor, to the "War for Hearts and Minds" that is about to take place?
What needs to be done in 2010? What can the left do in 2010 to ensure a better, stronger America for ALL Americans?
Before deciding what needs to be done, first we must remember what we are fighting for.
Paul Wellstone
July 21, 1944 - October 25, 2002
The people of this country, not special interest big money, should be the source of all political power. Government must remain the domain of the general citizenry, not a narrow elite.
~ Senator Paul Wellstone
"Politics isn't about big money or power games; it's about the improvement of people's lives"
~ Senator Paul Wellstone
"I think this is really a good example of the commercial calculus and ties taking precedence over everything else. It's sort of like the almighty dollar is triumphing over a lot of other values that we have as a nation."
It's no secret that the far right loathes anyone and everyone to the left of Adolf Hitler. Just try to get into one of Sarah Palin's Nuremberg-style rallies; you'll find plenty of evidence for that statement. But a certain branch of liberalism is hated even by unapologetic left-wingers.
In a 1996 column by Adolph Reed, reproduced this week on CommonDreams.org, the progressive writer summarized the reason for his hatred in one paragraph:
during the '80s liberal opinion gradually accommodated to Reaganism by sliding rightward. Two rhetorical justifications emerged for this adaptation. The Democratic Leadership Council called for a new centrism, jettisoning egalitarian politics and the constituencies identified with it. Additionally, an excesses-of-the-'60s-as-fall-from-grace fable propelled this slide and justified the smug dismissal of those of us who didn't want to go along. This new liberalism curtly demanded that we grow up and accept the realpolitik; Reaganism was all our fault for going too far anyway.
That evaluation is echoed this week by self-professed socialist and TruthDig.com writer Chris Hedges, who writes:
They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama-as if he reads them-asking the president to come back to his "true" self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America's liberal class an object of public derision.
Robert Scheer blasts Obama for wearing the mask of a reformer while continuing business as usual. Glenn Greenwald reports on the creepy, cult-like devotion of Obama's remaining supporters, exposing them for the false leftists they are.
Can one really begrudge these guys their bitterness? John Conyers can bitch all he wants about everything from witnesses thumbing their noses at subpoenas to continual waffling by Obamacrats, but at the end of the day he still cannot be counted upon to actually follow through on his frustrated-sounding rhetoric. The tired old man who had the power to start impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for two years and refused sure as hell isn't going to start playing hardball with Hopey McChangerton now.
The same holds true for the rest of the so-called liberals, who have proven as dangerous to America and the rest of the world as any right-wing, fascist Republican. These are the same people who regularly denounce anyone to their left as "purists," as though not selling one's principles for access to power is somehow a bad thing. These are the same people who promote half measures as the only reasonable things to push for, proceed to accept less and less when told no by the powerful, and then lecture us on the left for calling them on it as though we're made up of children who can't handle the grim realities of political activism.
Small wonder they earn the scorn of genuine left-wingers. Perhaps it is time for all of us who haven't thrown away our principles to look upon these pseudo-liberals for what they are: shameless phonies masking their true right-wing ideology.
Dear misinformed Conservatives, we are sorry that you have been lied to by the Corporate Media. We are sorry that the scare tactics work on you every single time, we're sorry that you don't know anything about American history or even recent events. We are sorry that you can't help but stare at the National Enquirer while on the line at the grocery store, but you're not going to hold the line up anymore. The world won't let you.
Dear Conservative Americans, we are sorry that you can't see through Sarah Palin's bullshit. We're sorry you didn't figure out that this country is fucked until after George W. Bush left office. We are sorry that you live in a fantasy alternate reality of someone else's making, and we are inviting you out and into a better place, because stupid is not allowed to hold back the whole class anymore.
This morning's Politico attributes the death of centrism in the Republican party to the overwhelmingly insatiable demands of the far-right riffraff. The sans-culottes throngs certainly have pitched some pretty parades over the past few months, haven't they? Heads have, metaphorically speaking, rolled and more are almost certain to take their place underneath the unforgiving guillotine. Yet, to insist that this was a movement spearheaded by the party itself would not be correct. This summer the GOP establishment tried to harness the energy of the rabble and found that it marched to no one's orders but its own.
"I don't give a crap about party," said Jennifer Bernstone, a tea party organizer for Central New York 912, which helped to lead the anti-Scozzafava charge. "Grass-roots activists don't care about party."
Says Everett Wilkinson, a tea party organizer in Florida: "We are not going to allow our [movement] to be stolen by the GOP or by any political party."
The Congressional Democrats' stampede to join Republican efforts to defund ACORN was stupid on many levels, as Paul Rosenberg explained in this post. Among other things, Rosenberg argued, Democrats empowered and validated the GOP's strategy of demonization. They may have thought cutting off ACORN's funding would cause Republicans to stop exploiting the issue, but of course, the opposite is true.
Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past ~ George Orwell, 1984
In the face of the revisionist historians on the right who would have you believe that Jesus was more important to the founding and building of America than our founding fathers, or that our founding fathers were in some way actually Religious and Fiscal Conservatives, I submit this theory for your approval.
The founding fathers were progressives
The Tories who supported the King of England were Conservatives.
If the Founding Fathers were Conservatives, we would still have a King.
Conservatives are never revolutionary, not unless that revolution is intended to halt progress and go backwards to the natural state of power in a nation.
Thus, conservatives conserve power and progressives seek change and progress.
For crying out loud....some people just make me shake my head and be disgusted. As many of you know, there is a potential health problem of major proportions going on in Mexico. Now for logical folks, commonsense says stay cool and find a way to help the less fortunate. But oh no, you got some on the Right who think "hot damn, I get to bring out the racist in me!"
I'm not normally one to rant - among the scores of diaries I've posted over the course of the past three years, only a handful are of the "screed" variety. The sort of diaries I usually do don't lend themselves to soapbox-style indignation - there's not much to be gained, legislatively or electorally speaking, from a knock-down, drag-out flame war over, say, assigning blame for the outbreak of the First World War.
Yet, as I've often stated, sometimes the worst thing about being an historian is that one often has a pretty good idea of what's coming next, decline-and-fall-of-civilizationwise. Certain patterns are discernable, and seem to play out each time a civ rises to a leadership role in human development or the exercise of might - and no civilization has ever shown itself immune to the degrading effects of time. Since often an understanding of the events of the past can inform the shape of responses in the present, it's here that this historian perceives a role for an historical rant.
No, I'm not dead. College and upcoming finals have eaten away at my time, but after next week I'll have a few weeks to get back into the swing of things. Now to business. It's no secret that since winning the recent presidential election, the left has been in an uproar over president-elect Barack Obama's right-wing administrative-cabinet picks. Complaints have been all over the blogosphere as well as mainstream news web sites such as Yahoo.
Obama's creatures are pushing back, essentially telling people to shut up, drink the Kool-Aid, and line up behind the Obamassiah. From the second link:
Responding to rising discontent on the left to President-elect Barack Obama's centrist cabinet picks and early policy decisions, deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand has told progressive critics to take a deep breath.
With a long list of tasks ahead of him, Obama needs liberals to stand by him as he deals with a faltering economy, home foreclosures, an auto bailout and two wars, Hildebrand wrote Sunday on Huffington Post. Even so, Hildebrand added, Obama was elected "to be the president of all the people - not just those on the left."
'This is not a time for the left wing of our Party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments that President-Elect Obama is making," Hildebrand wrote. "Some believe the appointments generally aren't progressive enough. Having worked with former Senator Obama for the last two years, I can tell you, that isn't the way he thinks and it's not likely the way he will lead. The problems I mentioned above and the many I didn't, suggest that our president surround himself with the most qualified people to address these challenges."
I'm inclined to tell fellow left-wingers to shut up and stop complaining as well, although for very different reasons. It was obvious to many independent left-wing voters that Democrat Obama would govern no differently if elected than his Republican counterpart, John McCain. More competently, perhaps, and with smarmier rhetoric, but such differences are in style, not actual policy substance. Too many liberals, fearful of another four to eight years of GOP domination, cast their ballots for the first politician with a "D" after his name that looked like a winner, either in spite of, or many cases, ignoring, the Democratic nominee's actual record as a legislator.
Well, guess what ladies and gentlemen: you got the president and Congress you wanted. You who voted for Obama have no right to complain now that he's doing the exact opposite of what you deceived yourselves into thinking he'd do. YOU voted for this. YOU are responsible for making it happen.
This is not to say that all is lost, or that because people voted for a right-wing Democrat he cannot be pressured into fulfilling the false hopes placed in him. Everybody makes mistakes, and mistakes can be corrected. The time for complaints is over. The time for action, for marching on Washington and demanding genuine change, for not going away until we get it, is now.
Tuesday night we were all fixated to the polls. We all cried (or at least I know I did - it was John Lewis that broke my dam on that front). I even cried yesterday, and I wasn't the only one. Here in Blue Connecticut there were many tear stained faces, many relieved looks, even a pervasive, genuine happiness.
I bought the paper with Obama's picture on it and the caption, "Mr. President" at the grocery store. The young woman ringing me up said, "I'm really glad he won yesterday."
Obama's remade the electoral map. Now it is time for us to remake our ideological maps - or specifically, I would advocate, completely rip those maps into shreds and start over.
Man oh man, if there ever was a prime example of a revelation of the greatest flaw in libertarian economic theory, it had to be Alan Greenspan's speech. For those not in the know, the former Federal Reserve Chairman spoke before a Congressional committee yesterday. Long one of the grand proponents of laissez fair capitalism, his decisions, ironically, probably has lead to the complete discrediting of such economics.
I saw this this morning on CNN and found it very interesting. I have been trying to put my finger on just what it is about Obama that has such broad appeal and why we need to stop telling him how to run his campaign. Follow me below the fold for the study proving Obama is a freaking genius.
I am always amazed when in the company of other progressives and liberals how truly regressive and unwilling to change we can be. Diary after diary, comments by the thousands about what? How we can't, how we shouldn't and how Obama is going wrong. Well Obama hasn't gone wrong, we've just stopped listening and started grinding the same old axes. We spend too much time bashing and not enough time listening, fear and ignorance is abundant on BOTH sides of the ideological divide. Follow me below the fold for hopefully some insight into how all the fears of your worst nightmares coming true are in fact the realization of your most heartfelt dreams for this country.
For anyone whose read my pieces in the past, knows that I hold a certain disdain towards former Reagan White House OMB Associate Director/conservative-libertarian Ayn Rand acolyte Larry Kudlow. It's nothing personal against the guy, it's his ideas and economic policy objectives that I find fault with. For the past couple of months, he's been going on about this is the "Goldilocks economy." Essentially, that we're worrying about nothing because one bad economic indicator is being offset by a good one (mind you, he's often just used productivity as that one). Well today, despite his claims that all is almost well, we got some news that just proves Larry Kudlow wrong!
The nomination of Senator John (the "Maverick") McCain has caused a lot of consternation among our nation's true right-wing heroes who feel he isn't conservative enough to fill President Bush's shoes. How can we separate the men from the boys (and the women, and the Hispanics, etc.) in the right-wing movement? The following test is a simple way to do just that -- calculate your right-wing IQ and use it to exclude the unwashed masses who are stinking up our Big Tent!
Record your answer for each of the following ten questions. The answers and a grading scale are listed below. No peeking until you have locked in each of your answers. The integrity of true conservatives means the "honor system" should work perfectly fine to score your own test.
I spoke to a right-leaning homeowner yesterday, owner of the mansion on the huge hill we had to ball-cart four 8 foot Pines Trees at and plant on his acreage. I changed his thinking.
He was a talker.
Ultimately, I made a statement to him, which brought him into full agreement with me:
"No, Sir, I think the bigger problem is that Americans never want to worry about a fire hydrant in their yard until their house is on fire. Then and only then do they want to cough up the money and time and allow one to be put in their yard. Then its too late."
March on Washington
