Today there's
a diary on the recommended list that made me feel one strong feeling: This Is Wrong.
This diary recommends sabotaging the GOP GOTV operations and solicits suggestions on how to go about it.
Going down the wrong road folks. We haven't even begun to do everything we need to do when it comes to our own GOTV, or own counter defense of GOP dirty tricks. In fact we're good at doing good, but we're such amateurs at being bad, that we ought to use Halloween as a dress rehearsal for retaliating at the GOP, by only just pretending to be bad. It's one thing to wear a Cheney mask, it's another to be Mr. Waterboarding Buckshot himself. We're all past being angry, outraged, we're living livid, but we're just not cut out for doing the dirty tricks that lead to the mangled ethics that lead to graft, torture and stolen elections that the Rethugs do.
Yes, if we start messing with the GOP GOTV, sabotaging their campaigns in an organized manner, and posting a recommended diary is being organized, we will suffer for it. The GOP will see it as justification for their crimes, and muddy the waters further for the undecided voters. We suck at being bad.
In the past 2 weeks, I've been proud of kossacks because people have posted many great diaries about how to GOTV and revealing the GOP dirty voting tricks and how to stop them. I've felt no need to add to it since people were doing a great job on it. But this diary is disturbing. It makes me feel how easy it would be to sway a significant segment of kossacks by pushing the right buttons.
But this is wrong. The further we start going down the road of our own Rovian tricks, the more we lose the moral high ground. The moral high ground isn't just something we get rid of because we don't get the right media coverage, or because the Rethugs get away with their crimes, it's essential because it effects how we operate ourselves. We go down that road and eventually people will be unable to tell the difference between a liberal criminal or a Republican criminal. I believe we are facing a criminal organization, that Bush has turned the Republican Party into a unit that has no respect for any law. If we start retaliating in kind, we are not making ourselves stronger, we are making ourselves weaker.
Ghandi, Luke Skywalker, and the U.S. in WWII, to name a few, didn't win in the long haul against a ton of injustices and horrible mistreatments, without being the good guy. They didn't trade in their ethical base consciousness to defeat evil. They operated straight from their ethical consciousness to inform their decisions, it was crucial to how they eventually won by making the right choices and people joined in willingly to make the right things happen.
In closing, I am posting this for two reasons. One, because the sabotage the GOP diary was on the Rec list. Had the diary come and gone quickly it would have had little impact. And two, because no front pagers have yet written a diary about this issue. They can better address such things than I, since I have no illusions about being able to have the eloquence, thought process, or credibility of a front pager; I am just a kossack who'd like to see us not go down the wrong road, and would rather have us pretend to suppress GOP GOTV on Halloween instead of from a jail cell for doing ultimately stupid stuff.
Update:
Since many people in the comments are missing my point, (perhaps because it's Friday by Halloween) I'll make it clearer here:
I am not arguing against an individual tying up a Republican caller or canvasser.
I am soliciting a community discussion over this statement and the comments it solicited:
"I hope to see more suggestions for sabotaging the GOP in the comments."
That statement and the comments it solicited created what seemed to be something new at dkos, that I think needs more discussion, the idea of organized sabotage of GOP GOTV in the sabotage diary.
I hope this makes it clearer.
And I think we should focus our attentions instead on GOTV, and getting our votes counted-- as in taking action that
this excellent diary, by 8ackgr0und N015e, advocated and did not get nearly as much or enough attention.