Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
— Mao Zedong, 1938
The Democratic Party leadership’s performance over the past 365 days is clearly bullshit. This is not an Obama-bashing. This is an entire Democratic party-bashing.
I’ve never been a soldier. But I damn well know a few things about war.
First of all, you protect your most important positions. At all costs. ALL COSTS. So, for instance, when a Democratic Senate seat – a seat that’s been held by a Democrat since John F. Kennedy – fifty-six years ago, is up for grabs, during a special election – you damn well put everything you have into protecting it. And yet, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair, Robert Menendez learned just a week and a half ago that the race was tightening? And where the hell has Tim Kaine been? You remember Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee? What the heck has he done for the DNC lately? (Howard Dean, any chance you’d consider coming back?)
This is just like Maine, when we lost marriage equality in November. We had won gay marriage in the legislature just months before. And yet, we lost. Why? Complacency. The same reason Coakley lost. Complacency. Not treating a prized possession like a prized possession. Not ensuring we protected our assets. (Note to all Democratic pols: NO vacation six months before an election. Did no one learn anything from Prop 8?)
And when the hell are Democrats going to learn to communicate? When are they going to learn to explain things, like healthcare, like the stimulus, and learn to get in front of the message? You can’t be a politician and be a back-seat driver. Not at the same time.
You know, there is one good thing about being a Republican. They’re fear-based. Republicans are afraid of everything, so they act like they are at war – all the time.
Sadly, life sucks when you live in fear. But at least, from a national, political standpoint, things get taken care of. Or taken-out.
Michael Steele may be a raving lunatic, but he is out there attacking anything that’s coming toward him, and anything that might be. Even things that are just in his head.
And that’s the problem with Dems. Lack of vision.
Maybe we should just have someone sitting in a chair, with the proverbial “gun pointed at their head,” forced to come up with every possible scenario of what could happen. Think of it like the Cheney Doctrine. (After all, for Cheney, 1% was all it took to go to war.)
Make no mistake. We are at war. The stakes are that high. (Don’t believe me? How many people die a year because they have no health insurance? How many people died because there was no hate crimes bill?)
Democrats, you need to learn to fight. That’s one thing the Republicans have over us. Not that we want to be like Republicans – just use some of their strengths.
The last thing this country needs is a return to Republican leadership. If you can call it “leadership.” Because they are the ones who got us to where we were exactly one year ago today, January 19, 2009: Bush’s last full day in office, and America on the verge of collapse. Hell, Obama & Co. had to drag George W. Bush over the finish line. Have we EVER seen anything like that before? Bush practically abdicated two months before he was done. At least Sarah Palin had the good sense to resign, knowing she wasn’t going to do anything for Alaska as governor.
Anyway, I’m sick to death of the Democrats pussyfooting around. They’re like high school kids scared someone isn’t going to ask them to the prom. Well, politics is Sadie Hawkins – YOU ask someone to the dance. YOU take control. YOU throw the first punch. YOU set the agenda. YOU make the rules. (Harry Reid, are YOU listening? President Obama, are YOU listening?)
And yet, all we’re doing is countering the Rush-Beck-O’Reilly-DeMint nutjob whack-a-mole machine. How much time and money has every politician, strategist, and blogger on the left spent licking a finger and putting it up in the air to see which way the Republican wind machine is blowing?
I say it’s time to blow back.
Full force.
Take the offensive.
I am sick to death of Dems doing things half-assed. Ask yourself, what is the last thing Democrats did 100%? What is the last thing we did that we put everything we had into it? And don’t say Obama’s campaign: remember the Hillary contingent.
I’d say, in the 1960s, when Kennedy staked a claim in a national goal of “landing a man on the Moon” by the end of the decade. And before that? When Truman dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were no-going-back, full-in, do-or-die moments.
Yes. Politics is war. And the Republicans are kicking our asses.
America cannot afford to move any further right. Too much is at stake. Healthcare, for one. Civil rights. Our relationship with the rest of the world. Infrastructure. Job creation. Financial regulation. The Supreme Court.
Yes, the Supreme Court.
As we’ll soon find out, win or lose, the Prop 8 trial that is currently on in San Francisco will force the Supreme Court to take up marriage equality in the next few years. And a conservative Supreme Court – which is what we have right now – will not hand over marriage equality to us, regardless of the merit of our case. It’s just not going to happen.
So we need to move the court to the left. Which means, we need a Democratic president to be in place to appoint more progressive judges to the bench.
George W. Bush put three conservative judges on the Supreme Court bench. We need more progressives. True progressives.
But, back to business. Democrats: get your asses in gear. Politics is war; take no prisoners. The enemy, trust me, has been given the exact same command.