Deanie's Blue Inkblots

THE REAL DEFICIT IN THIS COUNTRY IS NOT ECONOMIC

2010-03-01T22:56:00Z

A brief encounter I had on a social networking site that triggered an over-reaction in me, emotionally, because it brought back a flood of bad memories and distressing feelings I thought I had processed already in a thoroughly grown-up way and put behind me, got me to thinking about something far more crucial that lies behind the headlines you see about all this faux-populist "rage" everybody is supposed to be feeling these days.

It's about something that I think most people are missing. It's about what I see as the real deficit this country is facing right now, and it's an important one if we want to regain the kind of energy that can put us on the path to real recovery, not just economically, but in other, less measurable, ways.

They say that when you have been through a traumatic event, a simple, sometimes small thing, can trigger an outsized emotional response because it can bring back a flood of memories that can plunge you into a real-time re-living of that event. This happens to victims of post traumatic stress disorder all the time, and they don't even have to have severe cases of it when, say, they have been to war.

Ask a combat veteran you know, for instance, if he or she truly enjoys going to Fourth of July fireworks celebrations. The crowds. The noise. The fireworks themselves. Most of them can do it and, especially if they have small children, will do it, but that does not mean that they are comfortable there.

Or, say, someone who has been through a bad divorce; ask them if there is a certain song they hope never to have to hear again. Or an aftershave or perfume that can trigger a flood of memories both good and bad.

In my case, in a discussion over health care, someone commented that, it was wonderful how, "the harder you work, the better life you have."

And I said, "It's not true that the harder you work, the better life you have. I worked very hard for 15 years at a career I loved and I lost it through no fault of my own. In this country right now people are losing their jobs and getting laid off through no fault of theirs, and they can't find jobs. They're losing their health care, and they're scared."

And a conservative young man who is not one of my own "friends," but who has expressed contempt for the "liberal" point of view before in general and mine in particular said this:

"'It is not true that the harder you work the better life you have.' Oh brother, another victim. I need to hear this back story. I would have offed myself if I thought I didn't have any control over my life. Listen to some Tony Robbins Deanie.."

A snarky, snotty remark. A little thing. Not even on one of my blogposts or a political website, but on a social networking site among friends. The thing is, in that particular discussion, I had not been arguing policy with anyone. I'd simply been answering a question someone asked about veteran's benefits because I come from a military family and most people don't understand how the VA works.

And I suppose if I'd been thinking clearly I could have provided him with a back story because I'd written about it previously.

Instead, that one nasty little comment by a conservative young man out of the blue triggered in me such a flood of emotion that I was just smacked down by it; instantly transported back years to the day my literary agent had called to tell me that my publisher, who had paid $75,000 for my previous book, with foreign sales pushing it well past six figures, was now offering a meager $5,000 for my latest, and was renigging on bringing out my next contracted manuscript as a hardcover but was instead bringing it out as a paperback original.

All because Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City--it's a long story.

That phone call had set off a ten-year odyssey of Hurculean struggle as I did everything I could possibly think of to salvage my career--changing agents, changing publishers, changing genres, writing under pseudonyms, writing with partners, without partners, writing fiction and non-fiction--you name it, I did it. Having 10 previously published books did not shield me from collecting rejection after rejection while the creditors called and I filled out student loan forms in a desperate attempt to make sure my kids got to stay in school until they graduated. (They did, but both owed student loans.)

I'll never forget the day I sat down across from my accountant and told him that, for the first time in 20 years of being in the writing business, I had no income to report for that year.

That one quick snap of a few fingerstrokes on a keyboard by that young man made me feel about six inches tall, as if he were laughing at me, making fun of my heartache and pain, belittling my struggle. It made me feel defensive, it made me want to EXPLAIN about what it's like to be over-50 in this job market, to live in a town of less than 10,000 people 100 miles from the nearest shopping mall fer chrissake, with crappy health, (which was one of the reasons I had started to write in the first place, so I could work from a home office), to do the best you can and STILL, it's not good enough.

I wanted to talk to him about the nature of grief, about how when you lose a career that you love so much, it is like a death in the family; it is like a death of SELF, because you lose a part of yourself--you lose who you were when you were at your best. It wasn't just what I did, it was WHO I WAS.

It was a loss I have not been able to recover. I go to Amazon.com now and my books, some of them anyway, go for a penny now. Soon you won't be able to find them at all. If I want to write another one, as people urge me to do, chances are, I will have to invest the money to publish it myself, and take the loss if I can't market and sell it properly--a risk I'm not sure we can afford at this point in our lives.

It's relatively easy to start over when you are in your 20's. Not so much 30 years later.

I'm going into all this detail about my personal life not because I love self-confession but because I believe my story is taking place allover this country now; in factories and computer software companies and newspaper offices and small businesses that have closed up shop. I read somewhere, for instance, that local and regional television news stations are laying off their oldest anchors because they are the most expensive. So you've got 50-something news anchors being laid off from small markets after giving, say, 20 years to them. Many of them have settled in those small towns; they don't necessarily make THAT much money, comparatively.

What now?

There is very real fear out there right now, very real despair, especially if you're over 50.

And yet, in our zeal to be RIGHT in a given argument, in our desire--no matter what side of the political spectrum--we ignore that very real suffering just beneath the surface, and we go for the jugular, man. We want to draw blood.

I read that a man called into Rush Limbaugh's show. He'd broken his wrist and owed thousands in medical bills and didn't know what he was going to do without health insurance.

Rush said, "You shouldn't have broken your wrist."

Funny.

I'll pass that one along to my sister. She's a Republican. A conservative. She'll get a big kick out of that.

OR MAYBE NOT.

See, couple of years ago, on an icy morning, she stepped out her backdoor juggling a brief case and papers on her way to work, slipped and fell and broke her wrist. Had to have emergency surgery. Pins all over the place. A huge Medieval contraption on the thing looked like a torture device.

She showed her veteran's card at the emergency room and they said the VA would cover it, but then later, she got a bill for $64,000.

Well hell. She just shouldn't have broken her wrist.

Could this have something to do with the fact that my sister VOTED FOR OBAMA?

Right-wingers are laughing at the letters Democrats read at the president's health care reform summit, like the one where the woman was so desperate that she was forced to wear her dead sister's dentures because she couldn't afford the dental care to get her own teeth.

Funny.

Here's the thing.

Here's the REAL deficit we've got going in this country right now.

It's a deficit of COMPASSION. It's a deficit of COMMON HUMAN DECENCY.

The right-wing, especially, likes to claim some sort of monopoly on Christianity in this country, like they own Jesus.

But I don't think Jesus would have laughed at the woman forced to wear her dead sister's teeth.

When my sister was crying because she couldn't dress herself or go to the bathroom without help, I don't think Jesus would have mocked her and said, "Maybe you shouldn't have broken your wrist."

When people in this country lose work they love and are good at, and lose the income, and lose health care and fear losing their homes, or worry that their kids will have to quit college, I don't think Jesus would make fun of them for being "victims" and demand "the back story" while sniping that they should "listen to some Tony Robbins."

Maybe I'm too hard on the conservatives here, because I have seen it on our side, too. It's part of the rage and the snark and the snottiness. Everybody so quick to type out something hateful and nasty in order to be clever or right.

There are times I've lost my temper, times I'm sure I've said things I shouldn't have, too.

How much time would it take to type out something like this:

"Well, I'm so sorry about what happened to you. I know that right now a lot of people are hurting, but I must respectfully disagree on what role the government should play in helping to restore their livelihoods to them or keep their kids in college."

Rush?

How hard would it be to say something like,

"Man, that's a tough break on your wrist. It really is, and I'm sorry, but I just don't agree that it's the taxpayer's responsibility to provide ANY health care coverage options for the uninsured."

(I'm not saying I agree with Rush, I'm just saying you don't have to mock the man's pain.)

The thing is, I AM a tough broad, and I have a loving, supportive family. Eventually, I talked to them about the funk I was in and how stupid I felt for feeling stupid. Because they love me, they gave me more sympathy than I deserved, most likely, and they made me feel better.

But it's not me I'm worried about. There are so many people out there who are desperate, afraid, alone, and hurting. And when you lose a job or a home or your status in the community (which matters a lot more to some people than it ever did to me), or your financial well-being--you tend to withdraw.

You are raw, vulnerable. You feel like a failure even if you know, intellectually, that it's not your fault.

Those people who worked at Worldcom and Enron, for example. They knew it was not their fault that they lost their life savings when those businesses went under, but they blamed themselves for somehow not KNOWING. It's human nature. It's natural. And you just feel lousy.

And a silly little trigger on a silly little place like FaceBook or MySpace or Twitter can do a tremendous amount of damage to someone who is in that position.

You don't know, when you're sitting there at your keyboard back-and-forthing with someone.

They could be suicidal. Why would you make fun of their vulnerability? What have you to gain from it?

What have ANY OF US to gain from this constant hatefulness?

It doesn't take any more time to be kind. It doesn't take any time at all to imagine how the other person feels.

The best moment in the president's health care reform summit was when he was talking to Republican Senator John Barrasso from Wyoming, a former surgeon, who was going on about "health care savings accounts" and "catastrophic insurance." The senator kept talking about how cost-effective it was because people wouldn't get health care unless they absolutely had to because it would be too expensive. He even allowed, when prompted, as how that might work for all of congress.

Then Obama asked, "Would you feel that way if you made $40,000 a year?"

I was watching then. It's one thing to read about that, as I have done in several op-eds, but you had to be watching. The senator was literally stymied for an answer, because I daresay, that as a surgeon, it had been so many years since he had earned such a puny amount that he simply could not wrap his mind around the figure in time to give an answer.

Yes, if you earn that amount and you are raising a family with two kids, and you are paying a mortgage and car payments, and both of you are working outside the home--man, you can barely afford a doctor's visit.

Shoot, I can remember a time when our children were babies and my husband was training horses and we didn't have health insurance, the local small-town country doctor would have Kent come out and take care of his cows for him. In trade, he would encourage me to bring my kids by the office if they were sick, no charge. I'll never forget, if they needed antibiotics, he'd have his nurse raid the pharmaceutical samples closet for me so we wouldn't have to buy expensive drugs we couldn't afford.

Where has our empathy gone, as a nation?

Why can we no longer seem able to do that, to put ourselves in one another's shoes?

And while we're at it, maybe we need to be less hard on ourselves, as well. My husband reminded me of that old Eleanor Roosevelt quote, the one that goes, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

So yes. I am now withdrawing my consent.

But if we want to see some of the hate rhetoric toned down on the talk shows and blogs, we need to start out small, on our own social networking sites and in our own commentary. We need to be kinder, not just to ourselves, but within our own little worlds.

There is a lot of suffering out there that we don't know about, hidden behind the made-up names and emoticons and yes, even the hostility. Rage, as Psych 101 tells us, is the flip-side of fear.

But we can reach out, in our own way. Simply tone down the quick and easy quip that comes at the expense of someone else's pain. Recognize their humanity; their common soul, their own struggle.

Let them know we've been there.

And we survived.

CRIMINAL ACT? OR DOMESTIC TERROR? BETTER ASK GLENN BECK.

2010-02-18T20:54:00Z

*(investigation still ongoing, but based on what we know so far...)

Why isn't what happened in Austin today considered an act of domestic terrorism?

A man publishes a six-page manifesto ("suicide note" they call it in the media) on his website, detailing all the ways he feels he has been screwed by the Internal Revenue Service over the past 20 years. With the final sentences, "Here is my pound of flesh. Sleep well," he then allegedly sets fire to his own home (with his wife and daughter inside), gasses up his plane, takes off, and (apparently) deliberately flies it right into the building that he knows houses the federal offices of the IRS.

The resulting crash, as he (we can guess) no doubt anticipated, causes a massive explosion and fireball. I suspect that, if he was found to do what we're all pretty sure he did, then his fondest desire was to cause as many casualties as possible.

This was also the express purpose of Timothy McVeigh when he bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, because he considered himself to be at war with the federal government of the United States, and it was also the mission of al Qaeda when they crashed two jets into the Twin Towers in New York City--both clear acts of terrorism on American soil.

And yet this has been carefully framed as a "criminal act" by federal spokespersons and by the media.

I want to know why, since the right wing was so quick to howl, loud and long, that when an American Muslim shot up his own military base causing the deaths of numerous of his own colleagues--this was not workplace violence but terrorism as far as they were concerned; yet another act of Islamofascism....

Then if an angry white male who, no doubt, was at least sympathetic to the anti-government ravings of Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers--many of whom espouse constant ongoing rage toward "Big Government" (referred to as "Big Brother" in his manifesto), who sometimes discuss seceding from the union, who talk about armed revolution, who often urge the stockpiling of weapons, gold, and food and encourage the homeschooling of our children, who consider our president to be evil and who even advocate praying for his death--(allegedly) flies a plane into a federal building and tries to kill people, how is that not also, then, considered a potential act of terrorism?

I have been warning about acts of violence, either assassination attempts or acts of terrorism on American soil, for some time now, as I did in an April, 2009 blogpost, "I've Been Down This Road Before and I Won't Go Back."

In it, I wrote about what I observed while researching a book back in the '90's:

Fifteen years ago, give or take, I sat in a crowdedconvention room at the Sands hotel in Las Vegas, (which, by the way,was leveled long ago, wiping out a legacy of Frank Sinatra and usheringin Disney), and listened to a parade of speakers at the annual Soldier of Fortuneconvention who, basically, set up the construct that we werepotentially at war with the U.S. government and that we needed toprotect ourselves from invading jack-booted thugs who might wantto mount assaults on our homes and take away all our guns.

Ilearned about how to bury my assault weapons and other arsenals inspecial underground vaults that the dreaded bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,and Firearms would never find. I learned how to make my own bazooka. I learned how to use urban or rural settings to protect myself from thegovernment stormtroopers who were coming to steal my guns. I learnedhand-to-hand combat. I signed up to receive publications that wouldteach me how to prepare for the coming war--including hoarding gold,stockpiling canned goods and water, and home-schooling mychildren--without leaving any kind of imprint that would put me on somegovernment-snooping radar. I paid cash. For obvious reasons.

Atthe enormous gun show, I perused booths where I could buy completemilitary uniforms, (including various medals), every kind of gunimaginable, mean-looking knives with scabbards, tasers--well, you namethe weapon and I defy you to come up with one I didn't pick up in myown hands at that gun show.

At the gunshow, I bought books onexplosives, firearms, sniper rifles, techniques of warfare, creatingnew identities so that I could disappear, and catalogues of books thatare not published in any mainstream press. I picked up lots ofpamphlets on "Slick Willie" and his evil manipulative she-wolf wife,Hillary.

I passed a life-sized cut-out of an armed ATF agent,clad head-to-toe in Ninja black and leveling an automatic weapon at me,with a cartoon-bubble overhead that read, "Hi. I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

AndI spent some time around the bars that proliferated at each and everyconvention event--set up right outside each room of theconference--talking to mercenaries, gun-nuts, off-duty cops, rednecks,wannabe warriors, and militia paranoids. (In some of the talks, youcould count beer bottles lined up beneath people's chairs.)

I was the only unescorted female there.

Oneof the convention speakers, a highly-regarded former helicopter pilotin Vietnam, gave us a rundown of what really happened at the BranchDavidian tragedy, which had occured a little over a year before theconvention, on April 19, 1993. (This was early September of 1994.)

Withgreat authority, he told the packed room that he had a copy of theautopsy reports "on my desk in Washington, D.C." of the ATF agents whohad been killed in the initial raid on the Waco area, Texas, compound.

"They were shot by their own people, folks," he declared, swiveling his body so that the backs of his thighs faced the crowd. "Automatic weapons fire stitched right up the backs of their legs," he demonstrated, adding, with a scowl, "The Davidians didn't have any automatic weapons. The ATF did it to their own guys."

Leaning forward conspiratorially, he said to the hushed crowd, "AndI'll tell you something else. There WAS NO .50-caliber weapon in thatcompound. That's another myth perpetrated by the government."

Funny thing about myths.

See, the TRUTH is that I actually DID have an official copy of the autopsy done on the fallen ATF agents.

Ithad been given to me by the same Texas Ranger who had hand-carried a.50-caliber weapon out of the smoking ruins of the compound.

"If they didn't have a .50-cal," he told me drily, "then I'd like to know what the hell it was I carried out of there."

The REAL autopsy reports showed no wounds "stitched up the thighs" of those dead agents. Far from it.

Theywere wounded horribly and fatally in the kinds of places where youshoot to kill someone who is wearing bulletproof body armor.

Sittingin those rooms during that three-day conference, the atmosphere ofhatred and paranoia and rage was PALPABLE, real and tangible, like ablack foggy cloud settling over our heads. By the time I got back hometo Texas, I was physically ill, literally sick to my stomach from thetension I'd absorbed.

A tension, I might add, that was completely off the media radar and unknown to the vast majority of Americans at that time.

Mylittle adventure to the Vegas SoF convention was just the start of ayear's worth of research I was conducting for a book I was to write, a thrillercalled, Ordeal. (You can buy it on amazon for like, a penny, plus a fewbucks' postage.)

(...)

I spent a year working on thebook, and during that time, right-wing talk radio began to climb inratings and in nut-case ranting. G. Gordon Liddy made a new name forhimself beyond just being a Watergate crook and sadistic nutcase byadvocating that when the ATF came for you, you were to "aim for thehead" because they wore body armor.

During that time, I beggedmy conservative family and friends not to encourage that sort ofdialogue, that the hate-rhetoric had gone too far.

They laughed at me.

"Youdon't understand," I pleaded. "That kind of talk gives the unhingedamong us VALIDATION. It certifies that whatever awful thing he may beplanning to do is acceptable, even NECESSARY."

They mocked mefor being a crazy liberal, for taking life too seriously, for having awimpy draft-dodging womanizing president who needed to be impeached.

Butas the year wore on and the publications I'd secretly subscribed tokept arriving in my mail box, I began to experience a terrible feelingof dread.

"Something terrible is going to happen," I insisted. "You guys have GOT to tone this stuff down."

Turns out though, that I wasn't alone in my reasoning.

Because it wasn't just me who attended that Soldier of Fortune convention.

Turns out Timothy McVeigh was there too. (That link'll take you to a PBS "Frontline" documentary timeline of McVeigh's movements in the months proceeding the Oklahoma City bombing.)

On April 19, 1995, the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma was bombed into oblivion by that same Timothy McVeigh.

Iwas 400 pages into the manuscript of my book by then, and watched inhorror as the worst-case scenario I had imagined took place before myeyes, and the death toll mounted to more than 160, including 19children.

Of course, nobody could understand why McVeigh wouldgive law enforcement officers only his name, rank, and serial numberfrom his army days.

They didn't GET that he considered himself to be at war with the U.S. government.

The children, you see. Just collateral damage.

So, yeah, here we are again, as they say. Deja vu all over again. I see the right-wing hate/paranoia rhetoric ratcheting up again--I saw it get cranked up during the campaign when Hillary Clinton was such a favorite and then when, God forbid, a black man wound up a serious contender. And now I see it spiraling out of control again, and I'm warning people AGAIN that if they do not take serious heed of the incident in Austin, it will just be a warning shot across the bow.

There will be another Oklahoma City or a serious, and I hope and pray not successful, assassination attempt on our president. The further they go in portraying him as evil, as a tyrant and a dictator who is going to take away "our" cherished constitutional rights; the more they feed that rage of the nutcases out there; and the more the media is complicit in ignoring what is REALLY happening, the more this crazy car we're all trapped in veers closer and closer to the cliff.

Back when I was researching Ordeal and shouting out into the wilderness, there was NOTHING on the survivalists. Nobody really took them seriously. And I see some of that now when I read liberal blogposts and op-eds about the Tea Partiers. Some of them are so outrageous that people of intellect and education just can't believe that they could be anyone worth worrying about.

As a serious political force, perhaps not. We don't know yet. But as a potential assassin or terrorist among them? You better believe it.

One thing I learned during the crazy-survivalist nutcase years, well, I didn't really learn it then but I did after 9/11...There is a certain segment of our population--on the right or on the left, it doesn't matter--who just has to have someone to fear and hate. After the fall of communism--which that period comprised--they were denied their worst enemy. The Vietnam war was over. Our nation was at peace.

And they just could not STAND IT.

They had to have somebody to fear and hate.

So--it had to be The Government.

Timothy McVeigh did not care about the individuals working in that building. They were the nameless faceless monolith of The Government. Same with the guy flying the plane into the building in Austin, according to his website. The Government is the enemy.

But after 9/11, if you will recall, well, we suddenly had a real enemy, didn't we? We even had a brand-new, invented word: Islamofascist! Or, if you preferred: Muslim extremist. Whichever, it didn't matter--as long as they wore a turban or a headscarf or attended a mosque, well then, they were the enemy. Period.

During the Bush years, these people's hatreds and paranoias were stoked because they actually had real live WARS to fight (vicariously, since most of them did not send their own kids to fight in them, or fight in them themselves of course)--but all that Wanted Dead or Alive and Bring 'em On and slapping yellow ribbons on the ole SUV and flying flags and cock-swinging strut around the world stage, all that water-boarding and torture and Jack Baur on TV...that stuff was soothing to that sort of mindset.

And not just to the paranoids, but to the easily frightened, to those to whom SAFETY matters more than anything else in the world. And since Bush and his administration fed those fears over and over again, keeping the nation in a constant state of ongoing anxiety about potential terrorist threats, they flocked to him. After all, Karl Rove had said in 2002 that a good war would be a great way to get re-elected, and in 2004, the Republican convention was held in September, in New York City.

Reminders, constant reminders: Be afraid. Be very afraid. And let us take care of you. Only us.

So now we got a new guy in office, and what does he do? He reaches out to the enemy, talks of ending wars, ratchets down the rhetoric, speaks in soothing, intellectual tones. The nation responds with favor; they are weary of worry and fear; they are ready to hope again.

Which leaves the paranoids left out, looking for familiar enemies once again, only now, they've got Glenn Beck and the others on FOX News, constantly feeding the fear and paranoia, whipping up crowds, busing gaggles of people to events where FOX personalities put more quarters into the Machine. The president's a Fascist! A communist! A socialist! They're comin' after the Constitution!

They're takin' our country away from us!

I don't know if this guy was a fan, or a Tea Partier, and I'm not making that claim. It sounds like he was nursing a grudge against the IRS for a very long time. But taxes is a favorite cause to whine about for this group. All he had to do was read a few websites, or go to a Tea Party political meeting in Austin with the Oath Keepers and other crazies, or watch a few Glenn Beck shows to feel validated and justified to finally take matters into his own hands and fly a plane into a building, just as McVeigh must have felt at the Soldier of Fortune convention.

Just do it.

All is not lost, however, to the howlers and the screamers. Some voices of reason can also be heard through the din.

Some on the right are actually speaking out. They're not as loud, and sadly, not as widely listened-to, as the Becks and Limbaughs and Palins, but they are out there. And there are some, not just on the left, but some who used to be on the right, got fed up, and are now speaking out LOUDLY, who you can support by something so little as signing petitions and reading through their website and educating yourself to what they're doing, or in any other way you see fit.

And, as always, there is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been an ongoing force against hate crimes and domestic terror since its founding by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. in 1971.

In even smaller ways, we can speak out to family and friends, try to tamp down violent rhetoric when we hear it, try to counter viral e-mails with calm facts and humor, and when we have family and friends who try to push such things on us, let them know firmly, but with tact and love, that we are not interested--and that includes those on the left as well as the right. (Although I am hard-pressed at the moment to come up with any examples of truly violent rhetoric on the left that are less than 40 years old.)

Still, my point is, let's all try to tone down the rage. Let's not contribute, ourselves. We don't know who is listening. We don't know what demons drive them.

Words have power.

What Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers and the shock-jock radio and television personalities need to realize is that they bear some responsibility for where their words wind up. Do their words incite fear and make people afraid? Do their words incite hate? Do their words incite rage and paranoia? Do their words make people want to hurt somebody?

In the article I linked to earlier, "Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right," the one thing that stood out to me was how terrified was the woman who was profiled. She eats a steady diet of the kinds of words fed to her by Glenn Beck and the websites that traffic in that same kind of food. She is literally afraid that our president is a tyrant who is planning to round people up into some kind of detention camps, perhaps take away their guns, raid their private lives with the power of The Government. She won't go into a grocery store without a firearm. She is afraid all the time.

It is that kind of fear that fuels the kind of rage that blows up buildings.

And it is that kind of fear that is the ratings-driver behind TV parasites like Glenn Beck and political parasites like Sarah Palin, feasting like ticks on the blood of these people who buy their books, invest in the gold Glenn Beck makes money promoting, and pay astronomical fees to hear them speak.

Barack Obama had that kind of power, and he used it to spread a message of hope.

You don't fly a plane into a building because you feel hopeful.

STOPPING THE TROJAN HORSE BEFORE IT GETS TO THE GATES

2010-02-15T20:47:00Z

Usually, in a time of war, the troops on the ground can't really pinpoint when the tide begins to turn in their favor. They're still getting shot at and blown up. They're still far from home and it seems as if they're never going to get to see their loved ones again. Sometimes idiots tell them to do things they feel uncomfortable doing but they don't have a lot of choice in the matter; as long as it's not illegal or stupifyingly death-defying, they gotta do it.

But there is a difference, and they can feel it. Usually it has to do with a smarter strategy coming down from command structure. Whereas before, they were basically running around in a sort of clusterf**k, short on supplies and common sense, now they have clearly defined goals, good leaders in place to help them achieve those goals, and the weapons necessary to keep them alive. Maybe before, morons who didn't know what they were talking about barked blind orders at them from ivory towers, and now, their hard-earned combat experience is respected and listened to, and consequently, they're not losing as many good men and women in bad situations.

And there are fewer bad situations, all around. Civilians who once might have feared them, for instance, now come out into the marketplace again. Children play in their presence. Life flows around them. And soon, they realize that their work is done and they can go home.

Peace returns, not just to that country, but to their own.

Although the political battlefield is not life or death and lacks the intensity of war, the consequences can be every bit as serious, because, as we learned in 2000, elections do have consequences. Presidents may not have the constitutional power to declare war in this country, but they can certainly find ways to engineer them if they please, to the devastation not only of the countries they invade but of our own. War profiteering and private capitalist piracy can bankrupt nations and throw its citizenry into destitution if there are no checks and balances in place, no watchdogs or accountability or consequences for that wrongdoing.

The advent of modern technological advances have dramatically changed campaigning--instantizing and prolonging it. During the early years of President Clinton's presidency FOX news didn't even exist, and Internet use was far, far less than it is today. Social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace didn't even exist. Google didn't exist. Political websites like Talking Points Memo and Red State didn't exist. YouTube didn't exist. God knows Twitter hadn't even been imagined at that point.

Many of these things didn't even exist during George W. Bush's first term. Some of them, in fact, were created in reaction TO him.

As we all know, President Obama was the first to take full advantage of the new media in his presidential campaign, and I think what happened during his first year was that, first of all, he got completely blindsided by the absolute depth and depravity of the problems left to him by Bush. The financial problems, alone, which soared into crises mode just before the election, were so much worse than anyone had imagined in part because they'd been so skillfully hidden for so long, and no one on Obama's team had really counted on having to dedicate so much time and energy right out of the starting gate dealing with, basically, the potential bankruptcy of the United States of America.

All the problems had been neglected so horrifically. As many of you know, I come from a military family and so I have spent the past decade, really, reading everything I can get my hands on about both wars that Bush and Co. plunged this nation into, and most people have no CLUE as to how badly neglected Afghanistan really was.

Our guys over there...many of them were plunked out on the edge of some godforsaken mountain someplace and abandoned. They didn't have equipment to build basic shelter. They didn't have enough WATER. They didn't have HELICOPTERS. They didn't have enough AMMO. And they were left there like that for MONTHS.

This had been going on for years, because Bush pulled everything out and shipped it off to Iraq.

Now, it's not my plan to get off into a debate about either of the two wars here, but what I'm trying to say is that the DEPTH of the problems facing Obama were SO MUCH WORSE than anyone could have POSSIBLY IMAGINED that he and his team were just DROWNING in them.

These problems extended, in other words, into every single aspect of our government. Natural disaster management. The Justice Department. The Veteran's Affairs Department. Education. Interior. The You Name It Department.

And President Obama and his team just bowed under and went to work. And they did take on their signature issue, which was health care reform, because they knew they were going to lose some seats in 2010; they knew congress would be running scared for re-election this year, so they knew they had only one year to really have a fair chance of getting it through. They also believed that the only way to fix the toweringly rotten economy was to fix health care. Plus, if they could do that, it would help the Dems GET re-elected.

And in all that staggering amount of WORK...they forgot about MESSAGE.

Which, as we all know, is what the Republicans can twist around best to their advantage.

In fact, they've literally, gotten a 17-page playbook, written by a guy named Frank Luntz, on how to distort, misdirect, misrepresent, and downright lie about important issues of the day, how to twist and tie up the Democratic message in such a way that voters are so confused, in the end, that they'll pretty much believe whatever the Republicans tell them.

Especially if it will fit nicely on a bumper sticker or a Sarah Palin-type soundbite.

Luntz's previous clients, before he went to work for the Republican party, includes such luminaries as Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Ameriquest Mortgages. So far, he's provided Republican talking points on stopping health care reform and financial regulation reform.

Not only did Republicans have a ready-made propaganda machine in place, but they used it readily to lie for them, something that the Democrats have shown repeated reluctance to do. (Not that I'm recommending it. I'm just saying.)

Meanwhile, FOX News has provided a whole platform for the Republican message, weighted heavily toward conservative and tea-party madness. FOX News commentators, for one thing, are so quick to jump on the president's every word that, recently, after his first State of the Union address, the same commentators who called out liberals as "unpatriotic" and "America-haters" for daring to criticize--even mildly--President Bush over the Iraq war, now referred to the Democratic president of the United States as a "jerk," a "fake," and "arrogant."

At other times, their rhetoric has even veered toward the violent, and I'm not just talking about the certifiable Glenn Beck. I'm talking across the board.

And now, it seems that FOX has just stopped pretending that it's anything but a springboard for Republican politicians, as so many of its commentators are now blatantly using it to fundraise and/or to launch their own campaigns. The fact that the Federal Election Commission turns its face away from such blatant politicking is bad enough, but when the network hires politicians as commentators and then gives them carte blanche to use its airtime to set up their next campaign with no accountability for any of their claims and no consequences for the network...this gives the First Amendment a whole new, capitalist spin, with an assist, apparently, from Bush's favorite Supreme Court.

So while the president was working himself and his team half to death trying to clean up the toxic spill that was the legacy of the Bush administration, not only was he having to deal with the constant constant constant onslaught of the right-wing noise machine, but he was also getting attacked from the left, as well.

Some socialist, that.

Liberals assailed him for escalating the war in Afghanistan. They assailed him for not ending the war in Iraq fast enough. They assailed him for not making health care reform about single-payer, period, or at least, expanding the public option to include the whole country. They assailed him for "selling out" to financial interests.

I even read one blogpost headline who claimed Obama was actually a "moderate Republican."

Oh, for God's sake.

There were calls to start a third party--wow, those are soooo successful.

No matter what he did, no matter what he said, he was attacked, and the more vicious the attacks from the LEFT, the more emboldened and nasty the attacks from the RIGHT.

So...guess where the people in the MIDDLE went?

Yeah, why stay with the man?

It was at this point that I began to despair, truly despair. I could see us, as progressives, losing everything we'd worked for because of intransigence not just on the right, but on the left as well, and as for Obama, he was losing the message war. It seemed to be going on outside the windows where he and his team were working their asses off, trying to unravel the Gordian knots of fucked-up Bushian governance.

Then we lost Ted Kennedy's seat, and I swear to God I took it as hard as I did 2004. My kids knew it too because they both called home to make sure I was all right.

But my husband, the moderate Republican/Obama supporter who keeps being maddeningly right all the time, said, "This will turn out to be the best thing that could have happened. It will be a wake-up call to the president and his people. You'll see."

When you're hunkered down in the thick of battle, it's hard to tell that the tide has changed. It's just something you sense over time. It doesn't happen right away. Things accumulate.

First, I read this piece by Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com, one of the best political sites there is. And this stood out:

And all Democrats need to realize, meanwhile, that sometimes the message isn't going to sink in until the sixth or seventh time that you repeat it. Before Tuesday's State of the Union, for instance, the White House had almost literally never mentioned that the stimulus contained a huge tax cut -- they shouldn't expect the public to believe it any more than Warner Brothers should expect a ton of people to go out and see their new movie if they only begin advertising it 48 hours beforehand.

Rather, the Democrats need to figure out what their November messages are now and begin planting seeds for them now. You want to run on Republican obstructionism? Well then, don't neglect the golden opportunities that the Republicans are providing you with today, such as when they voted unanimously in the Senate against re-imposing pay-go rules or unanimously in the House against a very centrist financial regulation package. How many people know that House Republicans voted 174-0
against a jobs bill? It's probably not even 20 percent or 30 percent -- more like 2 or 3 percent, at best. The DNC, DCCC, DSCC, and sympathetic groups like unions should be blasting out advertisements whenever the Republicans cast a vote like this.

He went on to say that Democrats need to trumpet good news, no matter how modest, so that when elections roll around, they can take advantage of the fact that economic indicators are indeed improving significantly in terms of the recession and that Democrats and their policies can take credit for that. He said that, often, Democrats are too timid, too fearful that those indicators will not be there, but he says that, like Scarlett O'Hara, we shouldn't worry about that until the time comes. There's just as much a chance that they will as that they won't, and that the Republicans always assume--and brag on--the best in their own case.

And it seemed to me that it wasn't just me who'd read that piece, because I started hearing it from House and Senate Dems, and on political talk shows and on news programs and reading it in the papers.

This made me happy.

The next thing I noticed was the resurgence of David Plouffe, the wonderkind who helped propel Obama to the White House and then bowed out to write a book about the experience and to, literally, spend more time with his family because he'd seen so little of them during the campaign.

And baby, he's b-a-a-a-a-a-ack.

And I loved the first thing he said:

"Republicans right now are just sitting back and slinging arrows," Plouffe said. "We need to infiltrate their camp and shine some light over their side of the fence."

How does Plouffe frame the argument to voters? He says that Democrats have spent the past two years trying to fix problems while Republicans are asking voters for the chance to wheel a "Trojan horse" into Washington -- out of which will spill bankers and health insurance executives.

A Trojan Horse. Oh yeah. He's back.

Plouffe, it seems will be advising and helping to coordinate campaigns all over the country so that we won't get any more nasty surprises like Massachusets. He says that, many times, candidates' advisors rely on in-house polling apparatuses that tend to stroke the egos of the candidates rather than show up serious problem areas; hence, nasty surprises.

Not that we'll win 'em all, by any means, and not that he's going to be some Super Overlord or anything, but it should be better than it has been, anyway. The Obama people know something about winning elections and they, and their local volunteers, can help.

They can help a lot.

But it wasn't just Plouffe that excited me.

It seemed the affable Joe Biden had finally hit his stride, too. Or, as my Republican husband put it, "I love it. They let out the attack dog. I watched Joe Biden go after Dick Cheney this morning and he did a real good job."

Or, as E.J. Dionne put it (link above):

Yet by the end of the interview, I realized he had bumped into the hidden political issue of the 2010 elections. Beneath the predictable back-and-forth between Obama and his Republican adversaries over government spending lies a substantively important difference over how the United States can maintain its global leadership.

For Republicans, American power is rooted largely in military might and showing a tough and resolute face to the world. They would rely on tax cuts as the one and only spur to economic growth.

Obama, Biden and the Democrats, on the other hand, believe that American power depends ultimately on the American economy, and that government has an essential role to play in fostering the next generation of growth.

Notice that when Obama spoke about keeping America in first place, he said not a word about the military. He referred instead to the efforts of our competitors in the public sphere of the economy, and of our past complacency.

"Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse," Obama said. "Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations aren't standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs."

Suddenly, Obama's approach is not about old-fashioned Democratic spending. It's about patriotism, competing successfully, investing to maintain American economic leadership. John F. Kennedy provided a slogan for such an effort 50 years ago: "Let's get America moving again."

And that brings me to my last point:

The Man himself.

From the powerhouse State of the Union address, "We don't quit. I don't quit," to the rope-a-dopes session with the House GOP Caucus that left them bruised and bleary-eyed, to the fighting-spirit heartland speeches, his whole manner, his language, is reinvigorated, renewed, and re-energized.

He's taking control.

To House Dems, his message was equally stern: Quit whining.

And to the White House press corps, it's basically, hey, there's no new sheriff in town, here. I'M the sheriff.

In fact, they made it clear that the entire message has been revamped.

There will be four parts to this new message control.

One, there will be a more disciplined messaging, similar to the campaign days, which will focus more on the president's goals, which right now will be the economy and jobs.

Two, a quicker, more aggressive push-back against Republican attacks, as they have done against Republican accusations that they mishandled the Christmas Day almost -bomber. They're doing this with more direct responses from Robert Gibbs by e-mail to news outlets, (he also just opened a Twitter account), by using the vice president more aggressively, and so on.

Three, the president will be traveling outside of Washington, D.C., "the bubble" and into the country at least once a week, visiting with Americans and talking to them about their concerns.

And finally, he's going to try and get back to his original message of trying to be a change agent in Washington, from which he admits he strayed during his first year of such hard work.

Basically, the president will be front and center--not congressional Democrats. And people like what they see. Polls so far show that the president's popularity remain higher than that for just about anybody else in politics right now.

As my former Marine, Iraq vet son said, "He's the only man in Washington with a set of iron balls."

He hasn't given up on health care reform, either. In a recent call-out to the volunteers who helped propel him to the White House and who continue to remain engaged and active in the issues that matter to them, the White House has asked those volunteers if they would be willing to back up the candidates running for re-election who will be willing to stand firm for health care reform, and if so, would they be willing to volunteer time, either to make phone calls or write letters to the editor or just talk to neighbors and friends.

So far they've collected pledges of over four million hours of volunteer time from now to the election.

There are all kinds of ways to stop the Trojan Horse before it gets to the gates. You stop it with message control. You stop it with volunteering to back up Democratic candidates running for re-election or running to take over available seats in the House and Senate in 2010. You stop it by countering viral e-mails with bogus information that cross your desk at home.

No one man--on one president--is perfect. He's not going to be EveryMan or EveryWoman for EveryBody. But the one we have now is the best hope we've got to keep from opening up those gates and letting in that Trojan Horse.

Who might come spilling out of that horse? President Palin? A House and/or Senate so larded with Tea-Baggers and right-wingers that the gears of government grind completely to a halt and our own president is left completely unable to function, not to mention get re-elected--thus fulfilling John Boehner's and Mitch McConnell's dearest wet dreams?

What would be next? Impeachment over some bogus FOX-news trumped-up charges?

Is it really fair that every time a Democrat is elected to the White House, the Republicans are allowed to take that president completely down?

Are we going to stand for it again?

I don't think so.

And neither does Barack Obama.

HOW MEDIA MAKES US COMFY WITH OUR PREJUDICES

2010-02-06T22:10:00Z

Before I'm too hard on the media, I gotta hand it to ABC News, because they were the first on the story.

It seems that on the opening night of the ongoing Tea Party convention, their welcoming speaker, former representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, put forth the following idea:

That we should bring back into fashion literacy tests.

You remember literacy tests, don't you?

But before I enlighten those of you who are maybe too young to fully understand what it meant, particularly in the deep South, for persons of color to be asked to take a literacy test before they could vote, I'll let Tancredo speak for himself, as quoted in the article in the online ABC News:

"The convention's first speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado said that people who voted for Barack Obama could not pass a basic civics literacy test. "People who would not even spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House...named Barack Hussein Obama," he said.

"Yes, that's right. The president is a socialist, his supporters illiterate.

"Today, Tancredo stood by his comments. "These people didn't have the slightest idea about what America is all about, about the Constitution," he said. "And they went and voted!"

"The leader of the Tea Party convention, Judson Phillips, had no problem with it, either. "I think what Tom Tancredo was saying, he thinks a lot of people really didn't understand what they were voting for when they voted for Barack Obama," adding, "He did a fantastic job, didn't he?"

"Tancredo went even further about voters saying, "I think it should be exactly the same test that we give immigrants coming into the country. And if you can't pass a test about American civics that an immigrant has to pass in order to be here, then I don't think you should be able to vote."

Oh, I see.

Is THAT all?

Just a little civics test, to make sure you know what you're voting for, so that all those Meskins who can't speak English can't be bamboozled into voting for the colored guy, and all those ignernt ghetto thugs can't be railroaded into the voting booths to vote for the Negro.

THAT WAY we wouldn't wind up with a BLACK GUY in the White House!

I get it.

Really.

I do.

Although, just to enlighten things a TAD bit.

First of all, I might mention, just as an aside, that it is actually EDUCATED people who are the most drawn to Barack Obama, according to the latest Gallup Poll:

"Gallup has a new poll out. What does it indicate? That smart people like Barack Obama the most...What it says is that educated people with advanced degrees tend to be Obama's most loyal supporters."

Just to clear that little point up.

And, just so we're clear on what LITERACY TESTS really are.

The Raw Story goes into a wee bit more detail:

"Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters prior to Johnson-era civil rights laws.

"Prior to passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965, Southern (and some Western) states maintained elaborate voter registration procedures whose primary purpose was to deny the vote to those who were not white," a website for civil rights veterans explains. "In the South, this process was often called the 'literacy test.' In fact, it was much more than a simple test, it was an entire complex system devoted to denying African-Americans (and in some regions, Latinos) the right to vote."

"Because the Freedom Movement was running "Citizenship Schools" to help people learn how to fill out the forms and pass the test, Alabama changed the test 4 times in less than two years (1964-1965)," the site adds. "At the time of the Selma Voting Rights campaign there were actually 100 different tests in use across the state. In theory, each applicant was supposed to be given one at random from a big loose-leaf binder. In real life, some individual tests were easier than others and the registrar made sure that Black applicants got the hardest ones."

"White applicants could be approved even if they didn't pass the test.

"Your application was then reviewed by the three-member Board of Registrars — often in secret at a later date," the site continues. "They voted on whether or not you passed. It was entirely up to the judgment of the Board whether you passed or failed. If you were white and missed every single question they could still pass you if — in their sole judgment — you were 'qualified.' If you were Black and got every one correct, they could still flunk you if they considered you 'unqualified.'"

Yeah.

THAT "literacy test."

And make no mistake about it. THAT was the literacy test Tancredo had in mind.

Now, when I first read that, I was so horrified I literally shouted in my chair, at my computer, so loud that my husband came running to make sure I was all right. I copied the entire Raw Story article--which I encourage you all to read--into the body of an e-mail and sent it to everybody on my list. I put it up on my FaceBook page.

Then I opened up the Washington Post and read THEIR version of the opening day of the convention.

Tancredo's session was given three short paragraphs at the end of an article entitled, "The Tea Party is Still Taking Shape," and was written by Ann Gerhart and Philip Rucker.

And here are those three paragraphs, in their entirety:

"On Thursday night, giving the opening address, former U.S. representative Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination as an anti-immigration candidate, railed against Obama and "the cult of multiculturalism." Americans could be "boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state," he said. "People who couldn't even spell the word 'vote,' or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House."

"When Tancredo said, "His name is Barack Hussein Obama," the audience booed loudly.

"The race for America is on," Tancredo said. "The president and his left-wing allies in Congress are going to look at every opportunity to destroy the Constitution before we have a chance to save it. So put your running shoes on."

In other words, "the cult of multiculturalism" was the only mention made of Tancredo's loathsome call for literacy tests.

Now, according to ABC News, Tancredo's remarks brought bursts of applause, and furthermore, convention organizers defended the remarks.

And yet the Washington Post's political writers didn't even notice, or find reason to mention, them at all.

Back when I was writing and publishing suspense thrillers, I was often a keynote speaker at writer's conferences around the country, and it was not unusual for me to address hotel ballrooms packed full of hundreds of people, so I know how these kinds of conventions go.

The keynote speaker is there to inspire and fire up the convention-goers.

But the opening speaker, the welcoming speaker--they set the tone for the entire event.

Tom Tancredo's remarks basically stated that the purpose for the Tea Party movement is to ensure that we don't see any more people of color in the White House, among other complaints.

Even one convention attendee commented to a reporter that it hurt the movement that pretty much everybody there was white and middle-aged or older and said, "We need more diversity."

Yeah well, that boat done sailed, buddy. It left the dock about the time one of your organizers sent out a fund-raising e-mail showing our president dressed as a witch-doctor.

When the New York Times covered the opening day of the convention, it didn't even mention Tancredo's remarks at all, which is why I'm not bothering to go dig up a link to it.

What I'm saying here is that, if a major political paper like the Washington Post finds it necessary to tone down such a blatant expression of racism in their coverage of a political event, to the extent that they don't even bother to MENTION the literacy tests he clearly emphasized in his remarks, and the New York Times doesn't even refer to them at all, then what that does is, it makes those remarks palatable, acceptable.

Comfortable.

That way, we can all just settle in, get comfortable with our prejudices, and not notice when, suddenly, a Tea-Partier we weren't paying much attention to takes over the local election board and the next thing you know, there are real literacy tests in place.

It's not just our elected officials who have to be accountable. It's our media.

Racial prejudice has been driven underground but make no mistake about it; it still exists, and I swear to God some people don't even know it when they're doing it. I have conservative friends I've known for 30 years or more who send me jokes comparing the president or First Lady to monkeys. They do it in a spirit of play. They honestly think these jokes are harmless and are surprised to find that I find them racist and offensive. This is what happens when we get comfortable with our prejudices. We don't even know them when we experience them ourselves.

It's not a matter of being "politically correct."

It's a matter of compassion.

I have African American friends who I love. I can't imagine what they would think if I forwarded them the jokes that had been sent to me comparing the Obamas to monkeys. These things are deeply hurtful to people of color everywhere.

THEY CAUSE PEOPLE PAIN.

This is why we have to speak up. Speak out. Say, "That's not funny."

And say it to people whose job it is to report:

"Why didn't you call a literacy test a literacy test? A spade a spade, so to speak?"

If the Tea Party people truly want to be taken seriously as a serious political movement, then I suggest they look more to the future, and not, as a friend of mine who IS an avowed Tea Partier said to me one time:

"I want to take this country back...forty years."

TANGLED UP IN BLUE

2010-02-04T19:34:00Z

In the song, "Tangled up in Blue," Bob Dylan writes about how we all feel the same but from different points of view, even though we drift apart through the years, and listening to that song recently got me to thinking about words, how words count, how they're used, and how we don't use them.

For many years now, the Democratic Party faithful--me included--havebeen increasingly frustrated with the Dems' apparent inability to keepup with the Republican Noise Machine.

Although there is nothing new in this--think McCarthyism, or even thevicious jokes that went around about FDR from the right wing who mostassuredly hated their own private traitor to his class--this flood ofpropaganda seemed to gain its real foothold in the 90's with the adventof talk radio and the ascent of Bill Clinton.

To this day, I have trouble understanding the utter insanity of theright-wing hatred directed toward the Clintons. It was during thattime that I was researching a book, Ordeal,on the survivalist underground in the weeks and months leading up tothe Oklahoma City bombing, and what I saw and heard was so unhingedthat, at times, it literally made me sick to my stomach. I worriedabout assassination attempts. And I remember thinking that, in time,he would come to be regarded as a pretty damn good president, once alltheir hysterical racket died down.

I couldn't possibly have guessed, of course, that my own inept, dumbassgovernor would wind up taking his job, with such predictable results,that even the right wing would wind up speaking longingly of the daysof Clintonian balanced budgets, surpluses, and genocides stoppedwithout a single lost American life. But I digress.

Now, here we are, back again with a Democratic president and morehysterical ranting and raving from the right, only NOW, we've got todeal with an ENTIRE NEWS NETWORK to act as a supposedly legitimatemegaphone for every nutcase conspiracy theory out there, attempting,yet again, to de-legitimize yet another Democratic president. Theycan't bring this one down with any visible Achilles heel (sex scandal),so they're trying every other shit storm they can throw at him in thehopes that SOMETHING, ANYTHING will stick.

He's not a real American! He's a Marxist! A socialist! A communist! No wait! What other kind of IST is there? Oh yeah! An atheist! No? A Muslimist??? SOMETHING BAD!

And, yet again, Dems are forced to play Defense in this endless game,responding to ridiculous charges which then, give those sameaccusations a certain credibility.

During the Long Hot Summer of Alice's Tea Party Madness, I reallydidn't think that most Americans would take it seriously. Clearlythese people were crazy. I mean honestly.

So imagine my surprise when Independents started LISTENING to them andthe Democratic Party numbers began to drop and Republican Party numbersstarted going up as ever-fickle Independents began to be frightened YETAGAIN by hysterical panic-attack ravings from the right.

If it's not terrorists or "Islamo-fascists" gonna getcha, it's the guv'ment.

So I started my usual shouting at the TV news, to the Dems, that is:

IT'S THE MESSAGE, STUPID!

I was sick and tired of our losing the message wars to the nutcases.

Then we started losing races we shouldn't lose, and then I started reading more and more articles about all the successes theObama administration was having, and I could not understand why I washaving to read this stuff in places that most people never see: The Washington Post or the New York Times.

In other words, I wasn't seeing it on the network news, or the Sundaymorning talk shows. I wasn't hearing it from Robert Gibbs, and Iwasn't seeing David Axelrod stammer it out when he was asked. I didn'tsee Harry Reid whisper it over his receding stooped shoulder nor did Ihear Nancy Pelosi smilingly mention it to Jon Stewart.

WHAT THE HELL.

I was, instead, hearing all sorts of lunatic diarrhea of the mouth fromany Republican who could get near a microphone, and if they were REALcrazies, I'd see their rantings amplified by every news broadcast oronline political webcast in existence as it was repeated over and overand over again.

Over on the Blue side of the aisle, we didn't have any lunatic ranters.

We did have that Grayson guy down in Florida, God bless him, but everytime he spoke the truth, he wound up being forced to apologize bysomebody, and since he was a junior congressman, he didn't have enoughpunch to push it.

I watched the subtle ways in which the right-wing machine would shapethe dialogue of the mainstream media. For example, Media Matterscatalogues how, when President Obama talked about letting the Bush taxcuts on the wealthiest 2% of Americans lapse--those making $250,000 ayear or more--the Right Wing Noise Machine started in about how, tosome people, that's not really all that much money...and how,gradually, some mainstream newscasters picked up that baton and ran with it.

Well, I dunno about you guys, but if WE made $250,000 a year, WE'D be feelin' pretty rich. But I digress.

Brian Beutler writes for Talking Points Memo that part of the problem is that Dems just aren't all that good at (a) LYING and then (b) KNOWINGLY SPREADING THE LIE:

Part of the problem, (Congressional expert Norm) Ornstein says, is that Democrats don't have a vast propaganda machine.

"When an issue emerges--how to pound away at it? You don't need to[conspire]...Republicans just kind of know how to do that," Ornsteinsays. "It becomes an echo chamber that once its out there for a bit,bleeds over to the rest of the press. If it doesn't, then thoseentities [Rush Limbaugh, etc.] pound away at the Times, the Post and the Sunday talk shows for ignoring a big story."

That echo chamber goes hand in glove with a separate advantageRepublicans have: a willingness that Democrats lack to tell hugewhoppers about their opponents.

"Republicans are wiling to take rhetoric that goes way beyondreality--continuing to talk about the health care plan as a governmenttakeover. It doesn't matter much if you can take the fact and say it'snot true." Once it's out there, it's out for good.

Fivethirtyeight.com's Nate Silver doesn't think things have to be that drastic. He says all the Dems need to do is start paying attention to a coupleof things, like, the fact that MOST Americans don't live in Washington,D.C, and live and breathe politics:

We've repeatedly highlighted Kaiser's health care polling,which revealed that only about half of the public knows about many ofthe key provisions that are in the Democrats' bill, such as coveragefor people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, a Pew pollthis week found that only 26 percent of Americans know that it takes 60votes to overcome a Senate filibuster -- and only 32 percent know thatSenate GOPers voted unanimously against the Democrats' health careplan. And a Rasmussen pollof likely voters found that only 21 percent of them believe that theDemocrats have cut taxes for "95% of working families", a fact which isprobably true.

Idon't particularly blame the public for this. The number of politics"fans" probably numbers somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million outof a country of 250 million adults. Most people have lives and havebetter things to do than to follow politics all the time. They payquite a bit of attention during Presidential elections and, I wouldargue, make reasonably sophisticated decisions. But outside of that,most people aren't watching MSNBC or Fox News every evening or loggingonto the Washington Post or FiveThirtyEight. They're developingimpressions based on limited information, often gleaned from partisannews sources and politicians who have an incentive to tell themanything but the truth.

He faults the Dems for allowing three long months to lapse whilethey--and their cable-TV supporters--fought bitterly amongst themselvesabout the public option, which hijacked the entire health care reformdebate and enabled the Republicans to sneak in and basically thieve theissue right out from under them, which has now imperiled the entirething, because what happened was that the vast majority of people don'tpay enough attention and were not aware that the term "government-runhealth care" was ITSELF a lie, and that the Dems didn't even explainTHAT, they didn't even highlight the term OPTION properly. They letthe whole thing degenerate into a fight over details that could havebeen worked out later, frankly. The public option was not the entirebill, but by making it seem as if it was, they lost the message war.

He stresses the importance of repetition.

He stresses the importance of repetition:

And all Democrats need to realize, meanwhile, thatsometimes the message isn't going to sink in until the sixth or seventhtime that you repeat it. Before Tuesday's State of the Union, forinstance, the White House had almost literally never mentioned that thestimulus contained a huge tax cut -- they shouldn't expect the publicto believe it any more than Warner Brothers should expect a ton ofpeople to go out and see their new movie if they only begin advertisingit 48 hours beforehand.

Rather, the Democrats need to figure out what their November messages are now and begin planting seeds for them now.You want to run on Republican obstructionism? Well then, don't neglectthe golden opportunities that the Republicans are providing you with today, such as when they voted unanimously in the Senate against re-imposing pay-go rules or unanimously in the House against a very centrist financial regulation package. How many people know that House Republicans voted 174-0against a jobs bill? It's probably not even 20 percent or 30 percent --more like 2 or 3 percent, at best. The DNC, DCCC, DSCC, and sympatheticgroups like unions should be blasting out advertisements whenever theRepublicans cast a vote like this.

He also mentions what I think should have beendone all along, which is more crowing needs to be done aboutsuccesses. We all hated the strutting and arrogance and boasting ofthe Bush administration every damn time they crossed a T or dotted an iproperly, or just did their damn jobs without tripping over their owndumbass feet, but I'd like to see a lot more bragging from this WhiteHouse, and I think we're starting to. Silver says:

But if it were me, I would err a little bit less on the side of caution in highlighting numbers like, for instance, the 5.7 percent GDP growth that the country experienced in the 4Q. It's not that I expect these messages to be winners now;rather, it's that you want to plant the seed with the public for thefall. Otherwise, it may feel like too little too late when theemployment numbers turn positive too, and the public may believe thatthe recovery occurred in spite of, not because of, the stimulus.

What he's saying is, it's all about framingfuture messages, not so much worrying about how it looks now, buttaking risks that things will improve enough in the future that you canride the wave of how they look now. And if they look worse in thefuture...well, like Scarlett O'Hara, we'll worry about that tomorrow.

What Silver is saying about how most Americansreally don't pay enough attention to realize lies when they are hearingthem was brought crashingly home to me by another piece righthere at TPM, that, while it was based on a Republican poll taken forthe National Review--so you have to take it with a grain of salt--theresults basically say that even though most Americans know very littleabout the Tea Party movement, they like what they THINK the movement isabout.

It's kinda like thinkin' Sarah Palin would be a good president because she's "one of us."

It doesn't take a great deal of thought. Andlet's face it--so many Americans don't put a whole lot of thought intocurrent events unless it's right up close to a big national election. This is how they get bamboozled and hornswoggled by the bait-and-switchartists of the world.

But something happened on the way to the State of the Union.

Just when I thought we were going down for the count, my Republican husband was right again.

(Psst--please don't tell him I said that. He's just so insufferable when he hears it.)

In a previous post, AGGIE POLITICS, I wrote about how my husband, amoderate Republican but strong Obama supporter, told me that no matterhow bleak things may look at the moment for Dems, we should not give upon our President, because he's always pretty much been the smartest manin the room, and we should not count him out yet, and that, never fear,when it comes to Republicans, they always go too far.

He also said, "This Massachusetts loss may be the best thing thathappened to your party and Obama, because it will be a wake-up call. You can re-organize, re-group, come out with a new plan. It mightactually be a good thing."

I thought about this a few days later, during the president's speech.

When I heard the State of the Union address, I heard a very, VERYsmart reach-out to Independent voters. I heard a COMPLETE re-framingof the Democratic message.

I've seen a few op-ed writers who seem to have caught on to that butnone of them have come right out and said it, so I will, because Ispotted it immediately. In fact, I shouted and fist-pumped when Iheard the paragraphs in question, simply because of the CHOICE OF WORDS.

See, I'm a writer by trade. I make my living, such as it is, bylanguage. And choice of words is CRUCIAL in just about everything inthis world. It's crucial in diplomacy. It's crucial in politics. It's crucial in, say, job-hunting or resume-writing. It's crucial in,oh, say, marriage proposals.

Language matters.

And no one knows this better than this president, as he has proven time and time again.

Now, this past year, the language of governing has been robbed bythe Republicans. They stole it pretty much during the campaign andthey continued the rhetoric throughout the Inauguration and all throughthe entire first year of Obama's presidency. And he was just plainworking too damn hard to care, I think.

But the losses in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts--combinedwith the threat of the loss of health care reform--gave him what myhusband had predicted would be a "wake-up call."

The White House had seen the same poll numbersthe rest of us saw--that we were losing Independents to theRepublicans. And it wasn't "populist anger" that is the ongoingconservative-driven meme in the media.

It was the message.

So they reframed it.

Consider this passage:

From the day I took office, I've been told that addressing ourlarger challenges is too ambitious; such an effort would be toocontentious. I've been told that our political system is toogridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while.

For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: Howlong should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold?

You see, Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even asthe problems have grown worse. Meanwhile, China is not waiting torevamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. Thesenations -- they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing forsecond place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science.They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making seriousinvestments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I donot accept second place for the United States of America.

As hard as it may be, as uncomfortable and contentious as thedebates may become, it's time to get serious about fixing the problemsthat are hampering our growth.

COMPETITION.

This is Mom and apple pie to Americanseverywhere, and is just the kind of thing that appeals to Independentsand (closeted) moderate Republicans. It's very Kennedyesque.

Here's another fist-pumper moment:

I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelmingscientific evidence on climate change. But here's the thing -- even ifyou doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency andclean energy are the right thing to do for our future -– because thenation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation thatleads the global economy. And America must be that nation

In that way, he framed it not as a question over the science, orover the environment, but over JOBS and over America as a LEADER in theworld--again, We're Number One rah-rah!

This is a re-framing of a message that moves the Dems away from AlGore and more toward whoever your favorite sports team is. We want tobe winners. And we want our economy to thrive. If, in so doing, wecan also save the planet, hey, it's all good, right?

I'm not going to isolate every incidence, although there were many,because my blogposts are notoriously long anyway, but I encourage youto read the full transcripts--this is the copy I was working off of,from the New York Times. I prefer it over the Whitehouse.gov version because this is the one heactually presented, with applause and laughter typed in, and videoincluded.

Along with the subtle reframing of the White House message is also amore aggressive push-back against right-wing rhetoric. I had noticedthat they'd been given such a free rein for so long that evencongresspeople and senators had taken to spouting the latest FAUX-newstalking-points as graven facts before the TV cameras without so much asa peep of protest, but those days are over.

Today, for example, Robert Gibbs AND Attorney General Eric Holder each presented point-by-point pushback memos againstcomments made by Republican Senator Susan Collins and House minorityleader Mitch McConnell about the White House response to the ChristmasDay bombing attempt. They aggressively pointed out that the policiesthey followed were put in place by and followed by the Bushadministration--facts well-known by the Republican talking-heads.

It's still responding to lies, but I did see this on the eveningnetwork news, which means that even so-called "Joe (and Josephine)Sixpack" is getting the message that his handy Republican spokesperson spokeslied or at the very least, spokesforgot.

The reframing of message is deeper and clearer than most have picked up on, although E.J. Dionne, who interviewed Joe Biden today, got it loud and clear:

Biden, more self-aware than people give him credit for, realized whathe had just done. "I've sort of gotten off the Recovery Act," he saidwith a rueful smile.

Yet by the end of the interview, I realized he had bumped into thehidden political issue of the 2010 elections. Beneath the predictableback-and-forth between Obama and his Republican adversaries overgovernment spending lies a substantively important difference over howthe United States can maintain its global leadership.

For Republicans, American power is rooted largely in military mightand showing a tough and resolute face to the world. They would rely ontax cuts as the one and only spur to economic growth.

Obama, Biden and the Democrats, on the other hand, believe thatAmerican power depends ultimately on the American economy, and thatgovernment has an essential role to play in fostering the nextgeneration of growth.

Notice that when Obama spoke about keeping America in first place,he said not a word about the military. He referred instead to theefforts of our competitors in the public sphere of the economy, and of our past complacency.

"Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as theproblems have grown worse," Obama said. "Meanwhile, China is notwaiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is notwaiting. These nations aren't standing still. These nations aren'tplaying for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math andscience. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're makingserious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs."

Suddenly, Obama's approach is not about old-fashioned Democraticspending. It's about patriotism, competing successfully, investing tomaintain American economic leadership. John F. Kennedy provided aslogan for such an effort 50 years ago: "Let's get America movingagain."

(emphasis mine)

The purpose of the interview had been for Biden to point outinstances of the success of the stimulus program, but this turn oftopic turned out to show him to be crazy like, well, a FOX.

Biden's insistence on "pushing back" against unfounded criticisms ofthe program was clearly part of Obama's post-Scott Brown offensive, andit's bracing that the administration has finally seen the wisdom of aNapoleon axiom that is a favorite of Karl Rove's: "The whole art of warconsists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive,followed by rapid and audacious attack."

Transforming a listless national argument about the stimulus andhealth care into a larger debate over how to maintain Americanpreeminence is both audacious and useful. Off-message, Biden found theright message.

Perhaps the Dems have been "tangled up in Blue" ever since, well,the days of what I call the Clinton Crucifixion, when the sheer galland power of the opposition's noise and nastiness overwhelmed them. They've been like that plastic clown punching-bag ever since, bouncingback with every blow.

But this president is different. It's not that he's smarter thanPresident Clinton. I'm not going to compare the two men, because theyhave different strengths as well as weaknesses.

But one difference that does seem to count right now is Obama'squickness in learning from, and adapting to, the opposition--outfoxingthem--if you will.

He has not given in to them. He is still fighting for health carereform, clean energy legislation, education reform, and other things hebelieves in and campaigned on.

But what he has done is reframed the message in such a way thatmakes it much more appealing to the middle-earth voters, so to speak,those who were being frightened off by the scare tactics of the farright.

It's the same message. Different words.

And he's presenting those words differently, in a fiestier fashion. What the surly commentators on FOX called "arrogant," most Americanstook as a fighting spirit, and by a margin of 83%, they liked it.

As Democrats, it is important that we not get so "tangled up in Blue" thatwe forget that, as Americans, most of us, as the song lyrics say, "feelthe same" about most things. This is the beauty and the brilliance ofBarack Obama.

He's not pretending this to get votes. He isUNDERSTANDING this.

We want to take care of our families, find decent work we canhalfway enjoy, and have some sort of retirement with dignity. When weget sick, we don't want to die because we couldn't afford medicalcare. And, we care about our planet and our environment and don't wantit choked with pollution and grime. We want a place for our childrento play safely.

We pretty much all feel this way.

The Blues feel as if the Reds tried it their way, for the most part,since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. They had a pretty good run ofit, and from 1994 until 2006, they pretty much ran the country into theground.

Now it's the Blue's turn.

But we can't forget all those people out there who aren't payingthat much attention--at least not until they get screamed at orfrightened into it. We have to take care not to fight so much amongstourselves that we forget all about them and they turn away from us.

They're not "an illusion" to us now. We have to concern ourselves with "what they're doing with their lives."

We have to talk to them. Reach out to them.

Show them a better way.

GOP: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

2010-01-30T23:33:00Z

Republicans have been drooling over their last few ballot-box victories in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusets, stars twinkling in their eyes as visions of 1994 dance in their heads and they see a big landslide takeover of congress in the offing for them once again.

But the concrete steps their party is taking to make this dream come true actually have more in common with the DEMOCRATIC congress of 1994 than with the Republicans.

As was the case with the Dems back then, the GOP leadership is old-fashioned and out of touch with mainstream Americans, their party has calcified into a more extreme version of itself to where it now demands party purity among those it supports for campaigns, and it grumbles and separates itself from a young, charismatic, more moderate and popular president in the White House.

A key component to the way in which Rahm Emmanuel and the DCCC built up the Dem takeover in 2006 in the first place, and a BIG reason Barack Obama won the White House in 2008--was an appeal to disgruntled Republicans, moderate voters on both sides, and, basically, the vast majority of Americans who sit in the middle on most issues and swing slightly to the left or right on some things.

Maybe you're a fiscal conservative and pro-life but big on the environment and think Gays should serve in the military if they want. Maybe you own a gun and are a card-carrying member of the NRA but you lost your health care when you got laid off and you've wanted comprehensive reform ever since. Or maybe you're a union rep but not sure global warming is all that.

Few people are ideologues all the way down the line.

Few people on either side of the aisle could pass a friggin' PURITY TEST, but apparently, they'll get funds withheld from them by the RNC for political campaigns if they fail to pass such ideological purity.

The Big Tent theory of political partying that was embraced by the Democratic Party in recent years means that, yes, it is harder to manage a party under those circumstances, as Ben Nelson and Max Baucus and Jim Webb and others have proven time and again, BUT, when push comes to shove, they DID VOTE for the big things their president asked for.

Let's examine President Obama's REAL record this first year, not the one the media keeps whining about.

*According to a little-known and virtually unpublicized (it came out around the time of the Haiti earthquake) study by the Congressional Quarterly:

"In his first year in office, President Obama did better even than legendary arm-twister Lyndon Johnson in winning congressional votes on issues where he took a position, a Congressional Quarterly study finds.

"The new CQ study gives Obama a higher mark than any other president since it began scoring presidential success rates in Congress more than five decades ago. And that was in a year where Obama tackled how to deal with Afghanistan, Iraq, an expanding terrorist threat, the economic crisis and battles over health care."

His success rating, the study goes on to say, was 96.7%.

Think about that for a minute and contrast it with all the news stories, op-eds, and blogposts about what a failure this president's first year has been.

A success rate made possible by the votes he had available to him by a Democratic majority, I might add, even so-called "centrist" Democrats, that liberal Dems seem to think need to be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail.

(Or at least, given a purity test???)

*Here's another great piece, this one from Daily Kos.

It's a list--just a list--of NINETY accomplishments--President Obama has had in his first year in office.

Read them through. It will knock your socks off.

*Also, in a quick graph, the Washington Post put up a list of 25 campaign promises Obama had made, and of these, 21 of them had either been completed or were in progress IN THE FIRST YEAR. This is a phenomenal record.

Again, made possible because the DNC decided, after a dozen years in the wilderness, to reach out to the center, to moderates and disgruntled Republicans to run for congress and the senate, and they nominated in 2008 a candidate who, while a progressive at heart, was a pragmatist at his core, and he knew how to get things done.

Give him time, ladies and gentlemen, because he has only just begun to fight.

Yes, right now the GOP is licking its chops, certain that the "populist rage" it thinks it has captured is going to carry it into a majority and then the White House--maybe on Scott Brown's handsome naked shoulders!!!--but an essay by Charles M. Blow in the NY Times nails why it is really not a serious political movement when you try to harness the energy of a bunch of pissed-off paranoids.

The nightmare that the first "Tea Party Convention" has turned into, of hucksterism, profiteering, and inner-tea-party feuding--not to mention the fact that they can't give away tickets to see their keynote speaker, Sarah Palin, who has demanded more than $100,000 for a speaking fee--is just a glimpse of how ephemeral FOX-ed up, trumped-up rage can be as a serious political movement.

Not that the GOP has learned anything from that. They voted down a measure to create a commission on deficit reduction, even though at least seven who voted against it had earlier actually CRAFTED the legislation, and, among other things they voted against--they actually voted against Pay As You Go legislation that requires congress to pass only deficit-neutral legislation that is paid-for upfront, which is the way congress had balanced the budget and left a surplus under President Clinton, a Democrat, before President Bush, a Republican, took office and the Republicans took over congress and squandered the surplus.

I'm not arguing the merits for or against each individual piece of legislation mentioned in the previous paragraph, but what I'm saying is that, as in the State of the Union speech, when even after the president spoke of tax cuts for small businesses, and the entire Republican block sat like stone statues rather than muster up a smattering of applause for their OWN policy--they risk looking like the obstructionist dumb-asses they are.

And he knows it, as he so brilliantly showed when he spoke--on live TV--before the Republican Caucus last night.

In fact, so rope-a-dope perfect was Obama's performance at the Caucus that, as Sam Stein pointed out in a great blogpost for Huffington, FOX news cut the whole thing off 20 minutes early.

The GOP has, in fact succeeded in boxing itself into a pretty small corner since it first took over congress in the 90's and "The Hammer" and Newt Gingrich proceeded to run off some of the best Republican congresspeople and senators they'd ever had because they were moderates and had a record of working across the aisle with Democrats on landmark legislation.

Since that time, especially after their own re-districting fiasco that narrowed a candidate's area into even more partisan zones than ever, their party has bottlenecked its focus so badly that this "Tea Party" thing is their only hope of a pretense of "populism."

It's not real, though, not on a large scale.

It could be, though, if we think, over on our side of the aisle, that the only way to combat them is to follow their lead and, as our own Progressive Caucus recently stated, demand party purity of our own.

I've heard people insist that Obama act more like Bush, ignoring the vast majority of Independent and disgruntled Republican voters who helped to put him in office and only adhere to his "base" of progressive party purists, by "ramming through" his agenda while "he's got the chance."

I've heard people complain that the Democrats don't act more like Republicans, marching in lock-step like Stepford legislators, repeating cult-like mantras of party loyalty.

(Recently, even Sarah Palin was soundly criticized on Glenn Beck's program...why? Because she had backed Sen. John McCain in a difficult primary against the Tea Party opponent. McCain, it seems, wasn't "pure" enough for Beck's listeners. The fact that Palin wouldn't even EXIST, politically speaking, WITHOUT McCain was lost on him and his viewers, and any semblance of decent human loyalty was completely tossed in the name of party purity. THIS is what we want?)

But our own president has said that the reason he keeps reaching out across the aisle is because he wants the things that are passed in his term to LAST for GENERATIONS--not just until the next Republican administration comes in and, with the stroke of a pen, overturns everything he has done--which is pretty much what he has been doing to the bullshit Bush put in place himself when he was busy "ramming through" legislation.

And his patience, and willingness to listen and to reach out--while frustrating to his base, maybe--is working. According to polls taken following the State of the Union address, he is beginning to win over the Independents who had been frightened away by GOP scare tactics this summer.

The Independents are the key.

So what can we do, as supporters and as either Democrats or Independents who do not want a GOP/Tea Party takeover in 2010 to rival 1994? Not to mention a President Palin in 2012?

I suggest we follow Steven Benen's advice. Admittedly, it was aimed more toward the Dems in congress and the Dems in the partisan media than toward you and me but those of us who do blog or volunteer or even just speak up at the dinner table or stand chatting by the shopping cart at the grocery store, let's scream bloody murder:

Just pretend that the Democrats have pulled every stunt pulled by the Republicans in the past year, such as voting against funding for the troops, in order to obstruct the president, or trying to woo a segment of the party who would actually send out a fund-raising letter that depicts the president dressed as a pimp--and imagine the howls of outrage that would dominate the FOX airwaves and everyplace else Republicans gather.

Benen thinks that the reason the Republicans continue to dominate the message and the messaging is because they do the loudest screaming.

We don't have a screamer for a president, thank goodness, and I'm not advocating same, but I'm saying that the Republicans have allowed the screamers to take over their message, to their detriment.

At the very least, we need to be ready with the fact-checking and the righteous outrage whenever these stunts are pulled, to remind voters that what the GOP stands for, right now, isn't even very Republican.

And it won't be, until they let go of the party purity tests and reach out across the aisle, first of all, to a popular president, and then, to the rest of the country.

AGGIE POLITICS

2010-01-25T20:55:00Z

(I'm baaaaack. Didja miss me? I haven't posted a blog since November. Hope I haven't been forgotten altogether.)

Now, for those of you unfortunate enough not to know what an Aggie is, let me explain. Both my husband (Class '70) and son (Class '02) are graduates of Texas A&M University. Texas A&M, the oldest public university in Texas, started out as an all-male, mostly-military school, and the "A&M" once stood for "Agriculture and Mechanics."

That was a long time ago.

Now, there are more than 40,000 students in most every field of study, only a couple thousand of which belong to the Corps of Cadets, but the traditions that started with the Corps remain very strong to this day and are respected by former students the world over.

My son and husband were both in the Corps, and my son, Dustin, was also part of the prestigious Parson's Mounted Cavalry and the elite Cannon Crew, which fires off an authentic World War I cannon after the team scores in every home game at Kyle Field.

Texas A&M has lost students to every war since its inception in 1876, and, next to West Point, has lost more former students to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars than any other university in the country. The Memorial Student Center pays homage to former students lost fighting for our country, which is why no one--NO ONE--wears a cap indoors there and no one--NO ONE--walks on the grass of the grounds of the MSC.

Once a year, on April 21, "Aggie Muster," Aggies the world over meet to honor those Aggies who've passed away the previous year, calling out their names while those present say, "Here." This tradition has even been honored in war zones from Iwo Jima to Baghdad.

Football is pretty sacred to the Aggies too, as this is a Texas team, and many of you who have watched their games on ESPN have heard about some of the "Twelfth Man" traditions, such as the fact that the entire student body present always remain standing during the entire game.

This is so that--ostensibly--each and every student stands ready to heed the call of the team should they get into a bind and need an extra man (or woman, nowadays) to help them out of a jam.

(Students also kiss their dates after every score--and yes, extra points after touchdowns do count--which is another lovely tradition. Best thing about being an alumni is that you get to sit down during the games; but you also get to kiss your dates.)

Now, those of you who are football fans also know that the Aggies have had a pretty rocky past few years, and believe me, this is not the only rough patch in Aggie football history. My husband likes to joke that during his time in college, things got so bad for a while there that they were kissing their dates whenever the Aggies made a first down.

But here is one of the BEST things about Aggies. No matter HOW BAD the team is playing or HOW BAD they are losing, you WILL NOT see Aggies fleeing for the exits early. You WILL NOT see them cussing out their own team. You WILL NOT see them sitting in, say, a Longhorn bar in Austin, Texas, bitching about their losing coach to a teasip. (It's what we call those who attend or have attended t.u.)

Do they bitch to each other? Hell yes. Do they call for the coach's head on a silver platter?

Most assuredly.

But come game-time, by God, Aggies are AGGIES. It does not matter how bad we are losing, you do not have permission to trash us unless you are an Aggie. It's a rule. I do not know where it is written but I'm sure it's carved in granite someplace.

We stand united in a field of Maroon. We bleed Maroon. For life.

In the movie, BLINDSIDE, when the NAACP lady was so suspicious because Michael Oher's sort of adoptive white family had so vigorously channeled him to Ole Miss because the daddy had been an athlete there and the mama had been a cheerleader there--I totally understood that. If WE had "adopted" that young man, you think we'd've wanted him to go to t.u.????

I laugh.

Friend of ours, an Aggie buddy--he was a yell leader at A&M, and when his oldest daughter chose to go to t.u., it was so funny, he almost wouldn't TELL any of us. It was like, this family SHAME. <ggg>

Fortunately, his family honor was salvaged by the youngest daughter who not only DID go, but she married a fellow Aggie, and asked her Daddy to hold an Aggie Yell Practice AT HER WEDDING RECEPTION!

How cool is that?

So.

Why am I telling you all this? Why oh why am I inviting the abuse I am sure to take from the Longhorns who will be reading this? <ggg>

For this reason:

The Liberal Lion's lifelong legacy was taken over by a goddamned Tea-Bagger this past week, and I felt like shit.

I curled up in the fetal position, because I could see us losing not just health care reform, but all of it, everything the Obama volunteers had worked so hard for when we trudged around for two years trying to get him elected, all we had worked for trying to get this health care reform bill through Congress--I could see climate change legislation and smart energy legislation and education reform and ALL OF IT swirling down the drain and I was just beside myself with grief.

Mostly, I was mad at the Democrats.

I was mad at liberal Democrats for savaging their own president on talk shows and blogs because he was moving too far to the center for their taste, that he was "selling out" when all the hell he was trying to do was work with the conservative Dems he had in Congress; I was mad at Congress for taking such a ridiculously long time haggling over this bill; I was mad at the Dems in the Senate Finance Committee for WASTING half the summer trying to please ONE MAINE REPUBLICAN who then proceeded to throw it all in their faces; I was mad at the Dems who ran Coakley's campaign in Massachusetts for being so smug and complacent and letting this powerful moment slip through their stupid fingers; I was FURIOUS at EVERY PERSON IN MASSACHUSETTS WHO DID NOT WANT TO VOTE FOR NATIONAL HEALTH CARE BECAUSE THEY WERE HAPPY WITH THE UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE IN THEIR OWN STATE INCLUDING SCOTT BROWN WHO VOTED FOR IT AS A STATE SENATOR BEFORE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY SIGNED THE BILL INTO LAW.

I didn't want to vote for another Democrat as long as I lived because I figured they'd squandered the best chance they'd ever had, and now, based on only ONE election in ONE state, it seemed to me that most of the Dems in the House and Senate were running away from their own president as fast as their slimy little feet could take them, the sniveling cowards.

Yes, I thought there were some mistakes that had been made by the White House but not as many as he's been blamed for, not by a long shot. It looked to me as if the Democratic Congress was breaking the promises HE had made, after THEY had already VOTED on them!

(As if they won't have those votes shoved in their faces ANYWAY in the fall!!!)

I didn't want to support the party. Period. I didn't want to do any more politics AT ALL.

Then my Aggie husband had a little half-time pep talk with me.

See, he's a Republican.

He's also an Obama supporter.

He said, "You can't abandon him now! He needs you NOW more than ever! It's like a sports team. You don't abandon the team you love just because they're not playing well or just because they lost a big game. You don't suddenly start going to t.u. games just because the Aggies lost on Thanksgiving."

(Shudder the thought.)

He said, "If you walk away now, all you bloggers and supporters of the party, then he really WILL be alone, and he can't DO this alone. It would be as if the TEAM walked off the field and left the COACH to play the game without them! He needs you now more than ever. You have to fight for him; you have to fight for his programs and the things you believe in. They may not be perfect--God knows the Aggies aren't--but they're my team."

He said, "The thing about the Republicans is--and remember, I've said this before, and I was right before--they always go too far. They will go too far this time. They will get carried away. They've had three victories now and they're all full of themselves, all blown up with the Tea Baggers and whatnot. GIVE THEM TIME. Be patient. And don't give up on your own man. He needs your support, because if you bail out on him now, then you will be guaranteeing his defeat."

Spoken like a guy who knows how it feels to kiss his date on a first down.

What I'm saying is this. I know the liberals have been unhappy with some of what Obama has done but for Chrissake--do you REALLY want Sarah Palin or Scott Brown in the White House in 2012? (Don't think they're not grooming Brown for a run in 2012.)

You HAVE to consider the alternatives.

You may not get ABSOLUTE IDEOLOGICAL PURITY. So, DEAL WITH IT. But for God's sake don't sit this game out.

Keep standing up for our team.

Because, speaking as an Aggie fan, I can say this: Win or lose, there's nothing like being a part of that community, that family. Pouring into Kyle Field 85,000 strong, "sawing Varsity's horn's off" during the War Hymn, standing there till your feet get numb, getting a big sloppy kiss even for just a field goal, watching the band's military precision, reading the Yell Leader's signs before a yell and all 85,000 of you hollering out the same words at the same time until the car alarms go off--we're there for the long haul, not just for the feel-good gamedays.

Those of us who worked like dogs to get this man elected need to stand up for him now, not just on Inauguration Day when it feels good.

We need to keep fighting, keep blogging, keep after our congressmen and women. We need to stop wasting energy fighting against ourselves and against HIM, and turn our vitriol where it can do the most good--stopping t.u.

Woops. Of course I mean, stopping the Republicans. <g>

Seriously though. They're doing all they can to stop US.

Why the hell would we let them get away with it?