The Bulletpoint Blog

Three imperatives for saving the country

• you don't govern if you don't win.
• your best chance of winning is to study the habits of those who have won.
• "values" and "principles" have no business in a discussion about winning.

The Republican party now runs all the machinery of society, so they get to apply their principles. They got there by winning. We, the people, may gripe that they didn't follow the rules, but the reality is that they did follow the rules or the referee would have thrown them out.

There's no referee? Then there are no rules, silly. And we Democrats fancy ourselves as smart. Bah!

Karl Rove once "found" a bug in his office and called the cops to investigate about an hour before a major press conference by his candidate's opponent. Why is this interesting? The bug had a battery that would last 1 hour, of which about 15 minutes had been used by the time the cops arrived.

No tactic is off limits unless it is ineffective. Were the swift boat lies ineffective? Was the Rove-forged CBS memo ineffective? Was leaking Valerie Plame's identity to Novak ineffective? Was the Bush/Cheney "be scared" mantra ineffective? Were Bush's lies to us about Iraq ineffective?

The worst president in history just won by using cheaper, more brutal, more devious, nastier and all around better tactics.

Unfortunately, this is not what Democrats are good at. We need to learn. The next DNC chair should be someone who can light the fires of righteous passion in the true believers. He, in turn, should hire the creepiest, most amoral psychopath he can find to run the campaigns.

Case in point, the hypothetical boycott of products advertised on local right wing radio. The reason we should not boycott is because at this time it's counterproductive, not because of any other consideration, and we shouldn't be all squirmy about that calculation.

I admit - I have a fantasy about what the ideal US Government would look like, the values it would promote and the policies it would defend, but until Democrats win it's just a form of self-abuse.

posted by Lumberjack @ 4:07 PM