Obama won tonight. Added to VP Biden's win, that's Team Obama 2-1 in debates.
Obama got Romney laughed at. Fucking laughed at. Taking it to them is better.
Taking it to Movement Conservatism itself would be best.
I'm a Democratic voter because for even longer than I have been on this Earth the Democratic Party has been the party of better ideas, of good government via its policies, and because it has had a far more successful track record of doing right by the American middle class.
Sadly, the Movement Conservative Right, free of having to deal with such troublesome matters as "facts" and "math", and aided by a methodically gelded traditional news media, has also benefitted from the Democratic Party being far too nice for its own good for all my life as well.
Also, unfortunately, and probably for much longer than I have been alive, the Democratic Party has had this faith-based position, this almost quasi-religious belief, that some things are so obvious, so surely refuted by common sense, that you don't have to debunk, discredit, or attack them. Look at the difference when we don't do that.
Things so utterly daft that they are self-refuting and require no confrontational argument? Give them the numbers, look serious, and the masses will see? Or go at them, make them look foolish and incompetent and out of touch. I see the difference between a loss, and a freak-out, and a win and chests puffed out with pride.
Movement Conservatism has a long and ignoble history of epic fail, of house of cards bullshit sold with lies and fairy tales thought to be so obvious that merely just listening to them being uttered is an argument for the other side. A refutation in and of itself.
Yet we keep experiencing the same shit over and over and over again. The Right is not discredited, the same shit works over and over again because it is still credible and viable, and this reality slapping us in the face like a massive dead fish over and over again never changes how we don't tear down conservatism itself.
Let's call it "the Reagan is So Obviously Ridiculous We Can't Lose" fallacy.
In the aftermath of Obama's win, yet another in an endless series of reminders that these guys can't win a fair fight, I feel like we really should be tearing Conservatism itself apart based on the evidence we keep being offered by how pitiful the GOP is when faced with strong defenses and clear punching back.
When I was a kid, my union carpenter dad and union school teacher mom hung out with a lot of fellow travelers. We were working class people. Families and individuals who were mostly living paycheck to paycheck or moving through life but one disaster or calamity away from disaster.
I specifically remember that a lot of my parents friends were overjoyed about Ronald Reagan. They couldn't believe their luck. Reagan the GOP nominee for President. Wow. This is going to lead to a new age in Democratic dominance. Once people get a look at this guy? Sheesh.
A new golden age of Democratic dominance will logically begin.
"We are going to crush him, we have the facts on our side."
"He's a crazy, it's so obvious he practically guarantees a win."
"Crazy Reagan and his extremist ideas, his own peers call his ideas 'Voodoo Economics'."
And then Jimmy Carter lost the Presidency to Reagan.
Even after that calamitous loss in 1980, this bizarre and dangerous school of thought still lingered on, I remember the landslide 1984 election and hearing the same things that came out of the mouths of the same adults who, shellshocked from 1980, should have learned their lesson about believing that common sense is abundant and understanding what is in your own best interests always rules in America.
What I learned, as WLVI Channel 56 greeted me, twice, with "Ron 'Til Dawn" film marathons, was that you don't assume anything other that that you will always have to refute every bit of nonsense that comes out of the Right's latest Sainted mouthpiece. The Nixon years, of which my father complained bitterly when I was small, felt like paradise by comparison to the Reagan/Bush era for my parents.
Listening to Rachel Maddow's show last night, she talked, marvelled really, at the idea that Romney held an edge on dealing with the Deficit. Gobsmacked at how easy it was, and is, for the mega-deficit generating GOP to keep winning arguments they have no business winning considering what they do and what they stand for when in office. She pointed out that something is broken in a system that allows this to happen. Somebody isn't doing their job, yes, I agree. 100%.
But while I will always agree that the establishment political media is a rather useless castrated murder of fail, yes, absolutely, that is true, I have to say. In a two party system, there is only one party, one poltical force, that being the Democrats, who can truly check, and then rollback, the poisoned fruits of modern Movement Conservatism and the misrule that always seems to follow gains made by the extremist Republican party.
Movement Conservatism should be as seriously considered as Communism at this point.
Should be, but isn't, and largely because Movement Conservatism keeps its nose clean and its reputation intact even when individual Republicans get the royal shit kicked out of them. Time to take things to another level. Attack Movement Conservatism itself as well as taking it to the latest GOP hack, all the evidence is there that its a great idea.
We should do the foundation beneath Romney's feet, what Obama did to Romney himself tonight. Do it harm. Make that harm stick and make it unspinnably the story.
Attacking Movement Conservatism, and attacking it pointedly as a tried and definitely failed ideology, is fundamentally the key to not only beating Movement Conservatism, but making sure that it stays hobbled and is not quickly coming right back like some political Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers with its always everpresent machete raised.
Right now, as we wait for the feedback from the second Presidential debate tonight, how many Democrats are out there in this nation completely gobsmacked that, after everything the GOP has done to fuck up everything they touch, a poor debate perfomance triggered such a dramatic tightening in our polls? The panic and white-knucked terror that I saw grip this site was many things, but to me was a sign of surprise, of never seeing that coming as the contrasts between Obama and Romney couldn't be more massive.
How many Democrats, liberals and moderates alike, are stone cold bumfuzzled by Romney's post-debate staggeringly undeserved gains with single white women in surveys considering how bad he will be for women? How many believe, with every fiber of their beings, that the Iraq War has been so obviously bad, so thoroughly exposed as sold on nonsense and bullshit, so costly in blood and treasure, that it can't happen again in terms of a future war with Iran. Common sense. So obvious. No way that happens again.
If Mitt Romney is elected President, John Bolton and Liz Cheney will be up for either Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense. Book it. And the Iran War will be the highest foreign policy goal on their agenda for our military. They need to sell the 2 Trillion dollar boost in unneeded defense spending they are going to put forward, and to do that, they need a new war.
Which would lead us right back to Neocon bullshit, a compliant media, a public to be scared shitless, and a Democratic Party to face down all the pressure in the beltway press and punditry class to stand up to the war drums and not shit themselves thinking about 2014 being a disaster if they get painted as "weak" on national security.
I am a proud Democrat. I really am. I know that sometimes I don't sound like this is the case, but I am. I belive that Obama is going to do better this night, that he will win re-election, that we will hold, if not make gains in, the US Senate, and we have a shot at re-taking the US House and adding to the foundation that is the threatened ACA.
But the idea, the notion, that Movement Conservatism is so obviously awful and full of fail that you can avoid naked partisanship and going on the attack ideologically against the Right has got to die in non-Movement Conservative political thinking for good. Common sense is uncommon. Enlightened voters making political choices purely based on what is in their own best-interests is even rarer still.
The Democratic brand has not been bolstered by what we have done, for all the good and for all of the good governance we have seen from Democratic gains, since 1992. Movement Conservatism is still not only viable, but so viable that even after almost causing a second Great Depression they are back threatening to do not just more of the same, but far, far worse.
It infuriates me that in 2012, after the Clinton years, after Vince Foster was Murdered to the Arkansas Project to the Impeachment, to the mugging of Al Gore, to the pimping and aggrandizing of George W. Bush, to the mugging of Obama and the rise of the Teahad, we still in many, many ways have an entirely faith-based strategy for dealing with beating Movement Conservatism.
A "President" Romney, good sweet lord in heaven forbid, will add 8 to 12 Trillion dollars to our national debt if he is our next President, and it's not a secret. Even with that, he is favored over Obama on who is serious about the Deficit as per Rachel Maddow's show tonight. That's not insane, what that is a failure, a big one, evidence of fundamental political malpractice, on all of our parts as the opposition to Movement Conservatism.
this nation is still one hiccup one scare or one faux scandal that sticks away from a 50-50 election.
After everything the GOP has done to destroy the economy, our military, our environment, our schools, our courts, and our roads and bridges. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong when this can happen. As near as I can see, the biggest threat to Movement Conservatism, and the greatest saving grace for non-Movement Conservatism in general and for the Democratic Party specifically, is the demographic changes we are seeing in the country.
It sure as hell ain't the Democratic Party brand that is the Right's kryptonite.
But it should be. It's in the best interests of the nation that it be. It can be.
Every single battle where there are two sides punching, the Right has problems.
1992-2012 was a referendum finding a Third Way, an alternative to the Democratic Party making a strong ideologically-based and partisan argument against the Right and it's memes, frames, and lies. We have had two successful Presidents, both of whose rewards have been the same. Mugged by the Right in the first off-year election of their first terms, and to be constantly smeared, jeered, and kept under total partisan ideological seige by Rightwing bad faith and obstructionism. Does anybody doubt the Teahadi won't try to drum up an impeachment in an Obama term two?
And for all the deficit hawkery and willingness to cut the social safety net, the GOP, the party of mega-deficits and no numbers and 'trust us' math, still can find a way to con enough people in the nation to find itself with an advantage on fiscal seriousness and being thought of as better on the deficit with some lies, a few bits of bullshit, and the tired conventional wisdom of the useless Village media to back it up. Rachel Maddow, I love you to tears, if not for you, Keith Olbermann, and the Daily Show I might not have kept my sanity during the Bush years, but our party needs a huge mirror.
I'm sick of the cop-out, the lame excuse, that there are just so many dumb, apathetic sheeple people out there that we have to stick with doing the same things over and over again expecting different results and better outcomes. Movement Conservatism has to be discredited to stay on the defensive. To stay beaten for more than months.
Based on results, based on common sense, based on every possible metric of who had the better results and outcomes, the Democratic Party should currently be the most dominant political force in the country. The results should be the same if you go just on the Right's track record alone in isolation. I can't name a single economic policy of the Rightwing that has worked as they said it would. Not one.
But I can think of dozens of examples of how liberals have been right time and time and time again in the last 20 years about policy and about how to not get screwed for the same Lucy Vs. The Football shit that keeps on working even now.
Going forward, no rank and file Democrat should ever assume the political press will do its job, that both parties will be held to the same standards by the media elites or even the beltway political establishment itself, or that the public will just 'get' that something that is pure bullshit is bullshit. Ever. The future of the country is at stake, the Vilage fainting couch being full, and the Rightwing outrage machine being perpetually on fire, is a small price to pay to build the brand and start fixing these Rightwing messes more permanently.
I wish President Obama nothing but good luck after the better night he had going at serial liar Mitt Romney again. But it's long past time for us to stop wondering how bad the GOP has to get before the people wise up to how fucking awful they are, and start making the wising up happen. It builds the brand, gets better Democrats elected, and will save the country from the Crazies and the OverClass.
Obama fucking won. No freak-out. Game fucking back on. Let's kick their asses, and expand on that to muddy up Movement Conservatism as well on all levels of the party.
First we kick Romney's ass, then we teardown Movement Conservatism from there.
We have more than enough evidence that taking it too them is always the better option, now lets discredit their failed ideology soundly as well as their hack avatars.