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Rush Limbaugh is making fun of fat kids who are starving, Glenn Beck is a raving bigot, and Joe Barton defines the word tone-deaf. So what? I admit to being a little more pissed off than normal this week. I have been, well, a little on edge this week. Pity the deluded conservative who has crossed my path in the last few days, because my rational middle has swayed a bit off course. It is time, however, to wake up and get back in the fight. While we progressive types have been screaming at our TV’s, throwing our radios out of windows, and putting literary beat-downs on the intellectual equivalent of the 98 pound weakling, the conservatives have been lining us up for the kill.
The Big Spill became the event that finally pushed the President’s consensus approval ratings below 50%; and it came at a time when those numbers had begun a slow climb. As well, Democrats in the House and Senate had seen a steady, albeit incremental, increase in their numbers leading in this industrial crisis. All that has changed in the sunset of liberal hand-wringing over the federal response to the spill. We have allowed Fox News to lead the mainstream media into the false position regarding international help for the spill, and we continue to buy into accusations of a leadership gap from the White House. Some 20 years after the Exxon Valdez was driven onto a shoal, Exxon-Mobil payed the last of about $1 billion in damages. It had, through the clean-up, already paid about $2 billion. That is $3 billion spread over 20 years. Our President just got $20 billion over 5 years! No yelling, no displays of emotion, no fiery pulpit-pounding speeches; just results.
But while all this has proceeded, the conservatives have already been lining us up for another defeat. Last summer, we sat in the background while they prepared the way for death panels and a lost progressive August full of town hall ambushes. They are doing it again friends, and we damn well better be ready this time. The Department of Health and Human Services has been preparing and releasing rules pursuant to the Affordable Care Act (you know, the health care reform bill THAT WE WON). The U.S. Chamber of Commerce (aka; the chamber of big-ass industrial businesses that don’t give a rat’s ass for workers or small business) is out with attacks on the rules. the Heritage Foundation is out with attacks on the rules. Conservative bloggers are out with attacks on the rules. These attacks all display the traditional conservative math; limit the variables that aren’t favorable to their argument, and leave out all of the context.
I am devastated by the events in the Gulf, but we need to get back on point. It is time to start defending our gains in health care, and preparing the way for a successful mid-term election season. Start rereading the law summaries, and keep up to date on the new rules. Be ready to respond in comment sections to this garbage, and be ready to write your own blog posts and letters to the editor. We can’t just sit back and complain about Presidential leadership friends; we must actively engage in this fight.
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Michael Chase publishes The Rational Middle
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Just shrugged on the LBV, loaded up on facts/ammo, set the selector switch to rock ‘n roll.
Bring it.
The hard thing about combatting the Conservative narrative is that it is so irrational and fictionally based, that it is hard to counter using rational means.
The GOP has tried to ramp up citizen ire over the oil spill and direct it at the White House. Unfortunately (or fortunately) Joe Barton came along and clumsily spilled the beans on the thing they were really interested in – protecting BP. Although Bachmann said as much already, but I guess her boobs got in the way of Boehner actually listening to her say (out loud) what they really didn’t want the “small people” to know.
Blue gal and Driftglass say that you can dump a metric ton of facts on these morons and it changes nothing. I agree. It’s of a piece with “if you could rationalize with wingnuts, there’d be no wingnuts”.
Having said that, I believe the best strategy is to marginalize them at every opportunity because facts mean nothing to them.
The best way to do that is to mock them at every turn. Expose their idiocy in plain daylight.
Denny – exactly correct in your assessment – taking those idiots seriously is what gives them power and the “liberal” media wants them to have power. Easily conned and pampered brats in over exposed skin and too tight clothing living in a fantasy of being a hunk with a cause or a babe with a message….while they are nothing more than a dolt with a schtick.
Testosterone laden and past their prime, the tiny group of plasticized astro-turfers are all bluster and pomp with no real knowledge or strength but the power brokers want them to BELIEVE they have it. As long as they THINK they have power, they can be pulled along like a drugged bull with a nose ring.
As long as we buy they have strength, we won’t stand to them.
WE ARE the power now we must get off our asses and USE IT
CS;
Great post–I should write so well!
Constant exposure of their idiocy by debunking their stoopid hate mails and then viralling the truth make public what they would rather not have widely known about themselves: stupidity.
One of my favorite tactics is to use very edgy animated .gifs in any debunking of their lunatic hate mails– both to drive home the point and to insure that the exposure gets read. (Be sure to hit the “Reply All” tab to insure that all receivers of their original hate mail immediately get the point that the origianl sender is seriously deficient in brains). It works. It embarrasses them.
Mock them.
Mock them mercilessly.
Mock them without hesitation.