Why liberals lose even when they win

When I wander in the fields and groves of the internet, listening to the liberals and conservatives, Jesus people and atheists, it becomes more and more obvious that the liberals lose battles for a good reason: they don’t know who the real enemy is.

Visit a liberal political website, and you will see the liberals totally dazzled by the Wingnut Of The Day, and whatever crazy thing they said. Ted Nugent goes off on guns, Palin goes off on Obamacare, the Westboro crazies launch another crazy protest, and every liberal in cyberspace runs after them, pointing and yelling and screaming.

Even though the clowns like Palin and the Nuge and Allen West and Ann Coulter are, by a mile, the least important people in our political life. No one takes them seriously, people!

Liberals can’t win unless they know the enemy. More specifically, they can’t win unless they know who the most dangerous enemies are. Just as, if you’re playing the Miami Heat, you better have a plan for defending that Lebron guy.

So who are our most dangerous enemies?

NUMBER ONE are the conservatives who prevent liberals from even functioning in government: the state-level legislators and governors who gerrymander House seats and suppress the minority vote, and the Congressional Republicans who block liberal legislation and nominees. No matter how many votes Democrats actually get, no matter how often they win, these conservative officials ensure that the liberals never actually get to move the country in the right direction – and then blame the liberals for the lack of progress. And liberals like Reid and Obama let them get away with it, because they lack the stomach, and the tactical ability, to fight these guys. Leading this group are guys like McConnell, and governors like Kasich and Walker.

Also in this top group are the conservatives on the Supreme Court. While you were all celebrating their DOMA ruling you missed the fact that they just allowed the South to bring back Jim Crow voting laws. Oops! Failure to focus!

NUMBER TWO, second-most dangerous, are the money boys. The new wave of fake grassroots groups run by Rove and Dick Armey, and their ultimate paymasters: Big Oil, big banks, Big Insurance, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, and of course their lobbyists.

NUMBER THREE are the propagandists. And within this group, there are many levels. Most dangerous of all is ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, because they are selling their toxic ideas directly to toxic legislators, sometimes even writing the legislation for them. After them are the big idea-mongers: Murdoch’s Fox/Journal empire, and Rush Limbaugh who manages to get into everyone’s car radio every afternoon. Below them, less important, are the talking heads like John McCain and John Bolton, because nobody takes shows like Meet The Press seriously anymore, because the lamentably lazy mainstream media has totally bought into the toxic notion that both parties are equally culpable for the nation’s woes. And at the bottom are the nutfudge conservative sites like Breitbart, Newsmax, Drudge, World Net Daily, the Washington Examiner, and the rightwing think tanks: the only reason to keep an eye on them, is that rightwing nutjobs are going to be quoting these whackaloons in the websites we all visit.

This group also includes single-issue propagandists, and again some are more important than others. The most dangerous is likely to be True The Vote, because their efforts to suppress liberal voting are a direct threat to democracy itself. After them are the churches who can whip up millions of anti-gay and anti-woman votes, and to a lesser extent their allies like the Family Research Council. And of course the NRA which still has impressive muscle, and then Grover Norquist who no longer controls Congressmen the way he used to, and people like scandal-hunters Judicial Watch, who seemed to have lost heart when they realized that the Obama administration is the most honest presidential team in the last century.

NUMBER FOUR, the least important, the pathetic attention-junkie circus clowns. The Westboro Baptist Church, Sarah Palin, Allen West, Louis Gohmert, Ted Nugent, Anne Coulter, Glenn Beck. Nobody with an IQ above room temperature takes them seriously. However, they are dangerous because they distract you liberals from what the more dangerous conservatives are up to. While the bunch of you are ejaculating alarums over the latest racist screed from some maniac like Louis Gohmert or Nugent or Steve King, the real damage is going on in the background – McConnell blocking a good nominee for the NLRB, Rick Perry signing a Voter ID law, the banking lobby watering down a financial regulation bill, ALEC writing a new anti-abortion law.

So stop focusing on the easy targets, the carnival clowns, and focus on the guys who are actually destroying democracy, taking away our right to vote, gerrymandering Congress so that even when we win we lose, preventing the president from passing laws or even cleaning up Republican messes, and trashing the Constitution.

Focus! Focus! Focus! Attack the enemy that is most dangerous, not the one that attracts everybody’s attention! IT’S CALLED A DIVERSION.