50 Ways to Leave Your Liberals
Are the Democrats trying to lose elections? I'm not being sarcastic, this is completely serious. I've been thinking that the Rethuglican Right intends to hang on to power by stealing elections, as in by tinkering with voting machines and pulling all manner of illegal suffrage-suppressing dirty tricks. But perhaps they've vertically integrated a bit more than I had anticipated. Maybe they already control both parties, and this inter-party squabbling is all just an act.
Seriously. I mean, the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate could not have played these last few weeks any worse if they had been trying to fail. Mid-term election 2006 should be the gimme of all gimmes, the easiest election any professional politician would have to face.
The other party has been in control exclusively for 6 years and things are arguably as bad as they have even been for America in the modern era. (I'd say the Vietnam era is the only other one with an argument to make at all, and our present arguments are really just extensions of the same internal struggles that defined the late '60s: North vs. South, prejudiced vs. tolerant, hawkish vs. anti-war).
Poll after poll confirms the same thing: Americans don't feel safe, they don't feel financially secure, they're angry about government waste and inefficiency and they really really don't like the President.
Forget Democrats and Republicans. If you haven't been in control for the past six years, and you can point out any of the million stupid decisions that caused massive irreconcilable problems for America at home and abroad, BINGO! You ought to win that election. What can a Republican say?
"So, you've been running the show exclusively for six years and everything's shit."
"Well, I promise to try harder next time."
There's all kinds of talk about Democrats developing a platform, presenting a clear message to the country, all that kind of wonky "issue" political strategizing. This is utter nonsense. Republicans win elections all the time and they're not worried about presenting clear, concise and effective policies to the voters. Everything they do fails miserably, when they both to do anything at all! They just blast their opponents and make shit up.
Democrats should be hitting Republicans with the following issues non-stop until Election Day, without pausing to babble endlessly about shit no one really cares about at the moment like Medicare/Prescription Drug programs and midnight basketball games for inner-city kids.
(1) Republicans want us to break the Geneva Convention we swore to uphold and torture people, including many people who may not have even committed a crime.
Here you should also show some pictures of guy's getting tortured and tying these images to the Republicans who supported such measures.
Here's an article in which Democrats Harry Reid (the most powerful Democrat in Congress) and Carl Levin (the most powerful Democrat in the Senate's Armed Services Committee) effusively praise the BS McCain/Warner plan that would allow the President to torture people he dislikes. Prepare to be grossed out:
And Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, praised Senators Warner, McCain and Graham as “standing up to the administration” and producing a bill that, “while it has a number of problems, is a substantial improvement over the language proposed by the administration.”
Carl, Carl...You've missed the point entirely. The Republicans just ratified a bill giving the President the right to torture someone, so long as the torture doesn't give them a heart attack or liver failure or something. Sure, they pretended to argue about it for a few days, but only so they could then come out and pretend that this proposal is the result of a serious, informed discussion, rather than caving in to a sociopathic leader who reserves the right to have the shit kicked out of Arabs at his personal discretion.
He can, say, keep them standing in a freezing cold room for days at a time, occasionally splashing cold water on their bodies in an attempt to induce hypothermia. Hey, it doesn't cause any lasting scars! He can have fake menstrual blood smeared on their faces and fake electrodes placed on their genitals. He can threaten women with rape and children with murder, he can keep people cahined up in small cells surrounded by their own feces, he can order that they be held underwater to imitate the feeling of drowning.
Notice, by the way, how I'm ascribing all this stuff to George Bush, personified? That's whaat Democrats need to do, except instead of George Bush, they should fill in the name of their local Republican opponent who backed this legislation. (Only a few Republicans, like moderate Lincoln Chaffee, genuinely failed to support King George's despicable and un-American torture policy. Others, like McCain, only pretended to oppose the legislation in order to get it passed.
What I'm saying is, Harry Reid is many things but he's not dumb enough to fall for this ploy. This feels like an inside job. "Hey, guys, let's pretend like we don't want this torture thing passed, but not speak up so much, so it looks like we just fucked everything up again rather than helped the President deliberately."
The choice is already between gross incompetance and outright fraud, and I'm only on my first bullet point.
(2) Democrats should talk constantly about war profiteering.
The current Vice-President, a Republican (of course), used to run the most infamous, hated corporation in post-Enron America. (Okay, maybe next to Wal-Mart.) Yes, I know, this is one of those things Michael Moore brought up once, so no one is ever allowed to talk about it again because he's so goddamn fat. But come on.
And it's not just "Halliburton gets all the contracts because Dick Cheney used to run that shit." No, no. It's "Halliburton continues to screw over the American people, and Republicans know about it but don't do anything because they don't care." That's something simple, straight-forward, that anyone can understand even if they don't follow politics and have never heard of Halliburton before.
"Hey, did you know that the company that's supposed to feed our troops and provide fresh water hasn't been doing their job, plus they've been grossly overcharging the taxpayers for the work they're not doing?"
"Really?"
"I heard that they budget $100 for each load of laundry they do for our troops and $20 for every six pack of soda."
"No way."
"And you know the Republicans know about it, because they made the no-bid cost-plus deals with the company. And Dick Cheney used to run that shit!"
"No way."
"So you should really not vote for those guys any more."
"Okay, I won't. Thanks, helpful stranger!"
You know, it would go something like that...(See Robert Greenwald's documentary Iraq for Sale for more on this rage-inducing topic.)
(3) Republicans are terrible at running the country.
This one is so easy. Everything is going wrong. Just pick something and run with it. Katrina would be a good one. Anyone watching television could see that the government was just not doing its job down there, plain and simple. Sure, they could believe that it's all Louisana's fault, but that's an easy enough position to counter.
"If the National Guard troops hadn't been in Iraq, they could have been there helping out."
or
"It was supposed to be the Department of Homeland Security's job to provide oversight to just these kinds of federal projects. Disaster relief was in the charter as one of their key functions."
or
"If that had been a big city with a lot of wealthy white people, there's no way they'd have been left to die for almost a week."
But you don't just have to talk abouyt Katrina. What about not providing our troops with the equipment they need? What about the fact that the entire rest of the world now hates America, which isn't the best bargaining position? (I mean, Republicans want to bring up Hugo Chavez, as if he's a big embarrassing problem for The Left. Does anyone remember a time when foreign leaders brazenly and openly referred to our President as Satan in the halls of the U.N.? The fact that no one respects us is Bush's fault. Also, that idiot with the cop moustache!)
You'll notice I'm not recommending that politicians bring up the economy. Sure, the economy sucks and is about to get suckier. I just think that there's so much more visceral horror to discuss than the housing bubble. Why concentrate your campaign on boring old '90s "political issues" and not focus on all the glaringly obvious horrible things your opponents have just done?
It makes no sense...unless the whole point is to lose. Maybe Harry Reid feels safer as the leader of the small minority opposition party. Maybe he's like Will in "Big Brother." He doesn't want to win competitions and make himself a target. Better to glide along under the surface and hope those in power continue to screw up royal. Hey, he's an old man, maybe he figures he can ride out the Reign of Terror until retirement and never get blamed personally for anything.
I couldn't say. But I no longer have any real faith in Democrats to fix the country, because I doubt they're ever going to start winning elections in big numbers. And it's impossible to do anything if you don't have any power. (One of the key ways in which Congress does not resemble the "Big Brother" game). So I'm thinking the best way to start righting these wrongs is anarchist coup d'etat. Who's with me?
4 comments:
Dear Lons:
After reading this post, I surfed over vto Andrew Sullivan's blog and found this letter from one of his readers:
"Oh will you shut up already? Khalid Sheik Mohammed is not a veteran of the second world war, and nobody but you gives a crap whether or not this fanatical, mass-murdering thug is brought to the verge of suffocation in an effort to obtain information on the whereabouts and initiatives of other fanatical, mass murdering thugs. That's the only issue."
Because of my disability, I have spent far too much time listening to talk radio and have heard the same sentiments regarding torture or illegal wiretaps coming from listeners who call in.
Most people only care about events that directly and immediately impact their lives. As John Murtha said, only 1% of Americans are actively involved in the war in Iraq.
Yes, when people are polled, the majority say that they feel the invasion was a mistake and that it's not worth it, but the majority also say we shouldn't summarily withdraw.
Most people in this country aren't materially affected by the war in Iraq and have no real stake in its outcome.
The rest of the issues you listed don't really play well for the same reasons. Katrina? Well, gee, I don't live in Louisiana, why should I care? Or, here's another reaction: if you were too poor to afford a car and couldn't evacuate, it's your own fault, etc.
Sadly, millions of people think this way.
The Republicans have mismanaged foreign and domestic affairs terribly, but most people don't feel directly affected. It's very hard to create concise, sound bitey reasons to convince them otherwise.
On a practical level, you are correct. When it comes down to it, people motivate to act almost exclusively from self-interest. And this obviously includes voting. And, yes, a lot of Americans are callous about torture because they are stupid and don't think things through.
HOWEVER, and this is a big however, when it comes to political rhetoric, I fully believe that clear, concise and persuasive arguments that appeal to people's deeply-held optimism and faith in America work. Democrats have spent six years trying to topple the Bush regime by sitting back and letting them fuck up while making direct financial appeals to the poor and elderly. It's not working.
The fact is, Americans love sweeping rhetoric. They love idealistic speeches. A Democrat who went out there and harshly condemned torture, the Iraq War, corporate cronyism and George W. Bush personally would find himself (or herself) a groundswell of ardent supporters, provided he or she could get any sort of real media attention.
The reason guys like Russ Feingold and John Murtha haven't already made more progress against BushCo is that their own party constantly steps up to stab them in the back out of cowardice and greed.
Remember that this is what killed the Kerry campaign (well, this and voter fraud). He thought, "ah, no one cares about my position in Iraq...I'm going to promise to be a swell person and to fix the economy."
I think that inspiring rhetoric that is unnatached to events that peope feel dircetly affect them are just floating abstractions.
That's why I think Bush's numbers have declined to the extent that they have. When he talks about bringing "freedom" and "democracy" to Middle Eastern countries in a general way, people watching him who already tend to be dismissive of such talk blow a rasberry at their TV screen.
When Bush talks about how we have to stay in Iraq or otherwise al-Qaida will behead us while we're sleeping in our beds, and justify torture and wiretaps by linking them to our fears about terrorism, his numbers go back up a little.
As for Kerry's position on Iraq, some people, especially Democrats, cared. But then he articulated a position that was barely different frpm Bush. Kerry never said then that the invasion was a mistake and we should leave. He said that he would win in Iraq by bringing in allies, the UN, etc. and doing the war comeptently. Anti-war Democrats didn't want to hear that and Republicans weren't going to be attracted to Kerry no matter what. I didn't see any evidence that the Democratic Party failed to support him.
Kerry ran the worst campaign of a Democratic candidate in my memory-I've been voting since 1976-since that of Michael Dukakis.
In a way, you just made my point. Kerry spent no time elucidating a coherent position on Iraq. If he had come out and said, "I voted for this war, but I was wrong. It was a horrible mistake in the first place. It has likewise been horribly and ineptly mismanaged. We should leave as soon as possible," he'd be President right now, electoral fraud be damned.
Instead, he tried to have it both ways, to lamely prove to everyone that he could be "tough on terror," and became a ridiculous phony.
Soaring rhetoric is never connected to practical reality. That's what makes it soaring rhetoric. But it works! And torture is one of those essential moral questions that even lifelong Red Staters and Bible thumpers can understand. I mean, you can interpret Jesus' words in a variety of ways, but it's nearly impossible to read the Bible and conclude the guy was down with torture.
(And George W. Bush's speechifying doesn't work any more because he hasn't changed a word of his speech since 2003. Americans are stupid but they're still not THAT stupid. His poll numbers went up slightly because gas prices went down.)
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