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2014-11-06 -Short Attention Span Theater-
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Extremism wins, ideas lose
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Mark Morford is the guy, who in 2008 called Obama the Lightbringer or Lightworker, I forget which. His Magnum Opus for the 2014 midterm election disaster for the left.
It appears we have consensus!
Not that anyone cares, what with all the Democratic moaning and the Republican leering, liberals across American once again licking their wounds in a sort of dumbfounded, how-could-this-happen disbelief, as Republicans grab gobs of dumb power on waves of nothing but contempt, hostility and a derisive lack of a single fresh idea.
Out of ideas as opposed to every loopy idea the left's febrile imagination can conceive. Sometimes enough is enough.
Nevertheless, everyone seems to agree: Democrats were destroyed, once again, by the party's own infamous, downright astonishing ineptitude at executing (mostly) very good ideas.
Sez you...
| To be fair, he's right about them being inept -- at least in achieving what they promised, as opposed to what they intended. But that's a different question. |
A failure of nerve. A lack of ideological spine. A toothless mismanagement of a largely admirable agenda that, despite some terrific successes, never fully made it off the runway.
All I heard from the left in the final days before the election is how conservatives were going to stop wimmins from having sex and re-institute slavery. If that's your idea of an admirable agenda, well, look at what the electorate concluded...
It was the Democrats of Laficornia that voted to regulate wimmins sex on campus, not us troglodyte conservatives...
Call it what you will. But the president certainly didn't help, with his weird tone of detached apathy, his failure to grow some serious backbone to push back against GOP obstructionism and trumpet the party's successes from day one, all combined with a sort of pathetic lack of follow-through on maintaining the wild, youth-led enthusiasm he so rightfully earned in the beginning, and again in 2012.
Say it, I know you can: Your Lightbringer is a lazy slob of a leftist, along with his wife and his staff. And the "youth-led enthusiasm" was that the left cheated outright in many venues nationwide, both in 2008 and 2012; the only way he could win.
And Republicans? Simple. They won (again) because of their utter mastery at hurling empty propaganda, and their utter hatred of President Obama.
Hate the sin, not the sinner.
Though we don't have to be too fond of the latter, either...
Let us emphasize this point fully and clear: Hate won. Ideas lost.
I sat here and watched for eight years as leftist media attacked conservatives, repeatedly bringing false and outrageous charges of racism. It was ideas that lost, true, but it was the left's hate that placed the left themselves in the first place of the Republican's targeting queue, where they belonged. I witnessed as the left for six solid years used the offices of the government to attack conservatives and suppress free speech. If that is your idea of an idea, then, I'll take hate every time. F*cker.
Don't take my word for it. Republicans admit as much themselves. They widely acknowledge they forwarded not a single new idea, promised not a single fresh approach to governing. Far from it.
Since we believe that the good old ideas -- prosperity, tolerance, low taxes, less government, freedom, individual responsibility -- are the right ideas, we didn't need to conjure up new ideas...
In nearly every race in the country, Republicans ran on one campaign slogan and one slogan only: Obama is horrible.
Obama is horrible.
And it worked. It worked shockingly well.
You mean the Stupid Party finally executed a plan? Wowsers!
As with every mid-term, turnout was abysmal, young (liberal) voters stayed away, and those who did turn out were the Republican's most favorite chattel of all: older, fear-addled white conservatives who lack much in the way of critical thinking skills. Bingo!
See using the government to attack free speech as "critical thinking skills". I am white, older, albeit not fear addled, but I know a huckster and a confidence game when I see it. Doesn't take much in the way of "critical thinking skills" to know you are being cheated, but it does take tremendous "critical thinking skills' to operate a confidence game. Just as it takes a personal moral deficit to operate the con game and then complain when you are caught.
Can you pity, for a moment, the poor Democratic party? For the horribly ironic bind it finds itself in, over and over again?
I don't pity the left; I stopped pitying those bastards years ago. They got what's coming and in the same massive amounts they dished it out.
See, the party's most fatal flaw is also its most appealing trait: It lacks the murderous cruelty and savage bloodlust of the Republicans.
See the above statement and compare it to Wendy Davis and the Gosnell murders.
I have yet to hear a Republican pol, media personality or blogger come forth with eliminationist rhetoric in this election cycle. But the catalog of Democratic pols, media folk and blogger who did so would consume a few bazillion pixels.
Whereas the GOP has zero qualms about flinging outright lies (birthers, science deniers, creationists, et al) to get what it wants, not to mention an ever-present air of racism, sexism and a dark mistrust/hatred of everyone from Muslims to the entire African continent, Dems have no such arsenal, and no skill to use it if they did.
Actually this crop of Republicans is far less religious than before, but I do agree with the author that much of the opposition, supposedly conservatives are every bit an intergalactic freakshow as the left trots out on a daily basis.
Republicans will say and do anything to win, and are utterly ruthless about how they go about it; enacting a smart, fair policy agenda is almost nowhere on their priority list. Dems are the exact opposite: terrific agenda, lots of policy, but morally unwilling to play dirty, to murder their own grandmother in cold blood and blame it on the GOP, to make it go.
Wow.
| Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, President Obama's personal advisor on bioethics for the ACA, thinks our writer should commit suicide at age 75 so as not to burden his descendants with images of him in his final, mortifying decline. It could be argued that his side pushing suicide isn't exactly murder...in the early stage of the thing, at least. |
This is why there is no Democratic equivalent of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, no endless drumbeat of hate speech pounding across the flyover states 24/7, no incessant wails of fear, racism, hatred of Other. Liberal ideology prohibits such harsh machinery. The Dems are the party of the smart, the city, the college-educated, the critical thinker. Nearly every major metropolis votes blue, and every significant college town, and scientist, and artist, and creative entrepreneur.
Holy hell. Does he really mean that there is no "Democratic equivalent of Fox News"? When 90 percent of the electronic media are leftist and pro democrat to begin with, how is their "drumbeat" different? As for Rush, I listen to Limbaugh regularly, and I have yet to hear anything that can be considered "hate speech". Bullsh*t, true, but not "hate speech". The man is pathologically careful when to comes to "hate speech".
| "The party of the smart"? The man is too cute for words. |
The general truism remains: The smarter, more compassionate and more attuned you get, the more liberal you become. The more fearful, suspicious and egocentric you get, the more conservative you become.
It's the obverse.
| Clearly he hasn't caught up with the latest research on the subject. Ah well, some are only trainable, not educable. |
He's right: the Dems don't get Fox News, instead they get MSNBC. I think we conservatives got the better of that exchange...
So then, consensus: Extremism and odium won; intelligence and compromise lost.
For now, anyway. Some say this is just a typical mid-cycle backlash, a blip, part of an all-too-common Democratic surge/crash cycle that Obama had hoped to mollify, and failed. Badly.
First part of the article: OMG HATE SPEECH!!!! Next part: No big deal. It is almost an admission to a Big Lie.
Some say wait until Hillary takes over in 2016. Which is amusing given how, aside from her gender, Hillary brings the exact same gnarly set of political baggage as those who came before.
President Hillary Clinton, the Vagina Warrior. I can hardly wait.
Still others say that, despite this red surge, the country is still turning leftward overall, as demographics shift, women and minorities become more dominant, and older white males gasp their last. What with a lousy voter turnout and most of that from older whites from the red states, this election is a very poor indicator of overall direction.
Soooo, all that was said before is wrong. No big deal, right?
Guess again, Mark: Pubs won the Asian vote. They won the white women vote. They made significant inroads in the unmarried white women vote. They made inroads in the black vote. They just about won the young vote. And they won the white male vote, as usual, and by a bigger margin this time.
There IS NO progressive coalition. There was an Obama coalition in 2008 which you and your fellow travelers mistook for a progressive coalition. But when Champ isn't on the ballot, there is no coalition on your side.
One thing is certain: It's going to be a very ugly couple of years. Fumes of Bush, off-gassing of Cheney, sour fragrance of Rove permeates the air. Obama just got much grayer, though all is not necessarily lost.
Well, at least I won't have ugly leftist wimmin lecturing me on what a bastard I am. I can self assess just fine, thankyewverymuch.
Want a silver lining? A bright beacon of hope? I can think of two:
One (echoing John Judis' excellent point at New Republic): if voter turnout this election had been what it was in 2008 or 2012, Dems would have done much better. Women, minorities and young people, who generally lean more liberal, barely showed up. Which means potentially good news for 2016. If the Dems don't screw it up.
Yeah, that's it. If you only had time to tweak the message. As the Rooshuns say: Good king, bad Boyars.
| My niece, a college freshman minoring in wymyns studies, complained last week that absolutely everyone she knows has turned against the president they all used to adore together. It may already be too late for the Dems to not screw it up two years from now. |
And two? Well, that would be right here at home, California.
This state, the 8th largest economy in the world, is sort of a marvel. Governor Brown, who is 76 years old, just won again, in a landslide. Democrats have near-total control. And with the exception of a brutal drought, under Gov. Brown and just a handful of years after our state was the butt of a debt-ridden, downward-spiraling, Schwarzenegger-sized joke, the state is largely flourishing.
| For a given value of flourishing that completely ignores unfunded debts and pensions and such that the states and the fed were uninterested in covering not long ago. |
Brown is frugal, deeply intelligent, compassionate. The state legislature, increasingly un-gridlocked and free of trying to combat Republican cruelty and obstructionism, moves with a rare sort of ideological ease. Here, ideas can actually become reality. Agenda items evolve. Some surprisingly progressive proposals make it through. It ain't perfect and we have our own pile of issues, but considering this state's mammoth budget, stupefying economy and wildly complicated demographics, its ongoing success is nothing short of miraculous.
Until the pensions crash...
Is California a bright model of progressivism, wonderfully imperfect proof of what Dems can do when acidic conservativism and obstructionism aren't a factor? Just might be. One thing is certain: At this particular moment, as Mitch McConnell's flying monkeys swarm into D.C., cackling and smashing the furniture and ruining everyone's day, our calm, liberal bubble has never looked better.
Heh. 
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Posted by badanov 2014-11-06 00:00||
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Posted by g(r)omgoru 2014-11-06 01:33||
2014-11-06 01:33||
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Posted by Shipman 2014-11-06 07:08||
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Posted by Glenmore 2014-11-06 07:48||
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Posted by Pappy 2014-11-06 21:42||
2014-11-06 21:42||
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