So how has being nice and polite been doing for the Democrats lately?

[NNN0LHI]

:popcorn:

[mrcheerful]

1. Is that before or after I

ran the numb nut in the dented up 1974 caddy with bald tires and wordily possessions in the back seat plastered with DeVos stickers, Support the troops magnets and Bush 04 stickers off the road? I nicely gave him the finger as I kept going.

[HughBeaumont]

2. Pretty damned shitty, I venture to guess.

"Stoop to their level" MY ASSSSSSSSSS.

We're being outgamed by a bunch of backwoods, cross-wearing, Brooks-brothers-suits sporting wonk motherfuckers. Whether it works or not remains to be seen, but the fact of the matter is, Bewsh for some really suspicious reason is gaining in the polls despite six years of taking a shit on the world, the middle class and the poor.

How does that make you feel?

Here's another thing about that "October surprise" bullshit. Why are we letting a balding troll nerd like Karl Rove control everything?

[mrcheerful]

3. Try living in an city that even the homeless think they are doing

better because shrub cut their taxes. Nothing like seeing shopping carts filled with clothes being pushed by someone who sleeps under over passes and the cart has DeVos, Bush 04 stickers on it.

[lonestarnot]

24. You left off the red ties, red suits and fooking freak birthcontrol

glasses! Fuckwads with the downturned lips!

[Annces]

4. Watch your language young man

In OUR country, you don't go around trashing OUR devil, errr pretzeldent.

[gulfcoastliberal]

5. C'mon Don, aneurisms this earlier in the day?

Those DUers still card-carrying members of reality know the dems are intent on blowing any advantage over the pugs. Just witness how the torture bill will pass with dem support. Not all dems, but more than enough to guarantee passage and a filibuster-proof margin. Fucking worthless sellouts. Maybe this is what Obama was referring to about dems on security - we need to back Mr. Bush on whatever he wants, including the gutting of habeus corpus and the articles of the Geneva conventions.

[Cassandra]

6. Steve Gilliard's take on this...

http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/09/politics-on-wire.html

"A lot of people on Kos are pissed, and rightly so, but they didn't understand two things.

One, there probably isn't enough time for this to pass, reconcile with the House and then go to the White House, same with the wiretapping bill. It's going to take some effort to get them through, and there are more than a few people who don't want any vote on this at all. The compromise ie enough for them. A bill can wait.

Two, this isn't about torture. It never was. It was about Bush punishing the GOP for running from him. He was going to make them pay for their "independence" by forcing this. I wondered why he would bring this up when it would bring a nasty debate up during the election.

Well, that was it. He wanted the Dems to make outraged noises. They didn't. I wish this was about morality, but it isn't. It was a Rove trap. He wanted to make the Dems look weak and make them the party of terrorism."

Worth considering.

[maine_raptor]

9. Yup, those are good points to ponder.

Any bill will, more than likely, be voted on after the election. This is why you hear Bush screaming; "I need that bill NOW!".

True is, and the Congress-critters (D's & R's) know this, is that the CIA program is in limbo now (lack of high value detainees), so waiting a bit will not hurt the program.

The timing of this whole "torture debate" smelled of Rove from the beginning.

[robcon]

7. It'll get us at least one, maybe two houses of Congress this fall

Statesmanship, not red meat attacks, win elections.

[BootinUp]

8. We'll never know judging by this madhouse. lol.

[Warren Stupidity]

11. In which alternate universe is that true?

"Statesmanship, not red meat attacks, win elections."
????????????

[BootinUp]

12. Do you understand what red meat refers to?

It means things that appeal to activists, not the general voting population.

[Warren Stupidity]

14. Like for example

gay marriage
abortion
terror
class warfare
prayer in schools
stem cell research
'illegals'
evolution
.
.
.
.

[BootinUp]

16. I tire of your games. If you can get 51% of Americans

to jump up and down and cheer Chavez then more power to you. Otherwise its just red meat for the small percentage that eat politics everyday. The larger percentage wants some assurances that adults will start managing the government.

[Warren Stupidity]

18. Yes so you say.

And yet our great right of center moderate leadership has, per your prescription, played the statesman to the far right red meat political mud wrestling of the Republican party leadership, and has been losing ground election after election after election. Yes by all means lets try some more of the same while red baiting those of us demanding that the Democratic Party actually stand for something.

The Republicans win elections by motivating their base and dividng ours. We lost elections by demotivating our base and standing for nothing.

[BootinUp]

19. Some history for you

Go and review who the Reagan Democrats are. The battle to regain enough of them has been fought for 25 years now. Where have you been? Bush is about to hand us an election. Calm down and do what you can to support the Dems running for office.

[Warren Stupidity]

20. Oh I do support the Democrats running for office.

What I don't do is support our hapless leaders in their endless efforts to avoid taking a position that might actually inspire people to go out and vote.

[BootinUp]

21. I see your point

on the other hand, how do we really inspire people to vote that haven't ever bothered to before? I think that is the Big Question. Because I don't think they give two hoots about Bush favoring torture or Hugo Chavez calling him the devil or any of the stuff we have been discussing the last couple of days. They must not care about tax policy or the environment either evidently. Let me know what you think.

[Warren Stupidity]

22. Don't you ever wonder why the opposite strategy

appears to work so well for the Republicans? They are out there all the time stirring up their lunatic base. They couple that with their fancy computerized targeted get out the vote database, and their megachurch infrastructure and they damn well get out their base to vote every election. They deliberately go far right on controversial issues (see my earlier post) and then waffle back to the center. They deliberately infuse their words with code phrases to delight their base. They consistently stake out the right and we Democrats, with our triangulating bullshit, move toward an ever right-shifting "center" and in the process piss off and alienate our base who find ever more reasons to not bother voting.

If you are a working class baptist voter in Ohio and you have a choice between two pro free trade elites who both are enthusiastic about giving the rest of our manufacturing jobs away, one of whom hates them gays and loudly loves jesus, the other of whom can't seem to make up his mind about gays and doesn't wear his religion on his sleeve, who are you going to vote for if you bother voting at all? What might change your mind? The choice that has faced the Democratic Party for 25 years is 'are we the party of the working class or are we republican lite?'

[BootinUp]

25. So what we need is a Democrat from the Democratic wing

The problem with your theory is that it simply has things backwards. It is not that there is no such candidate. Its that there is no demand for such a candidate. It takes real social upheaval to get these idiots out to vote who currently stay away from the polls.

[Warren Stupidity]

26. Well I disagree.

And that will have to do. I believe that a lot of our base doesn't vote because our leaders do not represent anything different to them than the other side, and that they will continue to not vote, or worse to vote the other way, as long as the triangulating ever more right-of-center new democrats control the party or, until we have a crack up on the order of 1929. And you may very well be right that the crack up is the most likely scenario.

[Ken Burch]

27. Most of what appeals to activists APPEALS to the general voting population

Universal Health Care.

Getting out of Iraq.

Full employment.

A clean environment.

Ending tax cuts for the rich.

[SmokingJacket]

17. Guess it's another wait and see, then.

Because they haven't been winning much lately.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

23. So repubes have been winning all this time because they're statesmen????nt

[TheCowsCameHome]

10. Finishing second in elections, for one thing.

[Jacobin]

13. They'll help keep the illusion alive that we have two parties

and a democracy in this country, which is important for the next time the junta wants to go invade a country to steal its oil, so we can say we are doing it to spread glorious democracy.

[BurtWorm]

15. See this

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2194231&mesg_id=2194231