pleading with ernie

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You know, some days I just spend entirely too much time getting my ideas out in comments elsewhere, and I have been doing it again too much yonder and then becoming too drained to cover the same ground here, or then it all starts running together in my head and I forget who I told what bit of it, or maybe subconsciously I think you are omniscient and see absolutely everything I set out anywhere, including just in my own head. This probably isn't the case.

So, Ernie, someone I suspect of being a deeply good man, or trying hard anyway, wrote a piece about getting Winograd in to do instead of the deplorable Harman, struggling with the progressive imperative, and just becoming irked by my foreign pronouncements no matter how hard I try to put in the pointer arrows that he might get the right idea. Anyway, I just spent a bunch of time again trying to spit it out such that he might not snap closed and follow the contours of his gray matter in his chess game against the awfulness in the world.

You know, Ernie, I think what I'm forgetting to say about all this is that it isn't a matter of progressiveness right now so much as it's anti-fascism, anti-neofeudalism, that is the imperative. They have a lock on our country and all its political mechanisms. This has to be broken before progressivism can ever get its ass back off the ground, no matter how hard we work to get progressives in to replace the fascists. They continually are turned into appeasers of that beast, if not becoming finally too tired of the pressure and just joining in, settling for the perks. So if you want to be effective you shoot for gathering everyone who is anti-fascist under one tent, whether or not they're "progressive" and make sure that lock is blown off the door to American governance.

Beside my multifarious attempts to show where mental blocks impede the sight needed, at the bottom of all of them is simply, You can't get there from here!

Jane Hamsher is on the right track. We should not be letting our prejudices and long-held feelings of animosity toward "the other side" get in the way of our sight, our ability to create the force that gives us back a country wherein it's even possible to place our kind of candidates in office and expect results.

Truly, now, truly, we've done this too many times to still be thinking it's going to get us anywhere. Personally, I have been thinking the only cure would be armed insurrection, but Jane has put a klieg lamp on the way that would not involve literal bloodshed and yet very well might be sturdy enough to get the job done.

I implore you to stop being so closed-minded about this stuff. I spend a great deal of time snooping around the web and listening to people from all political leanings, and the tea party people have been coöpted from heavily Ron Paul people to heavily stanky Republican shills. It was very easy to do because they are all so angry. Not stupid. Angry. An angry person is the easiest person in the world to manipulate! So it would be just as easy for us to inform that anger and turn it toward a more productive force. And a billion times more so with assholes [or maybe former assholes] like Grover Norquist on our side. Long as we stick to the truth we can manipulate people's anger to fight for it.

You have stated, and quoted Old Droner, on how the vast majority of Americans are progressive, and I believe this honestly cannot be questioned. I believe it because I know so many self-identified "conservatives" who want mostly the same things I want, and you want. That vast majority of progressives doesn't fit into one party or the other, and a bunch of them are certain all these taxes and this hulking government are NOT the way.

And they MIGHT be right! There are other ways government can get the money for progressive things besides taxes. Or if it's taxes paying for them, they have to be so wonderful even the people we think are just selfish tightwads right now are also so happy they stop minding paying.

A lot of them only mind paying this much because they're struggling too hard to make it and getting bubkes but a steadily growing mountain of dead brown people for their trouble.

People struggling that hard resent the snot out people who get things for free. It's not very nice, but even the nicest people can cave to this weakness under this much pressure.

Truly, Ernie, please open your mind. We are in dire trouble. Even if everything else might somehow be straightened out to stop threatening so much, the climate crisis won't wait, and it's thoroughly reprehensible—MONSTROUS—to let them keep piling up so many bodies while we dither and "hope" and scheme about how to eke another progressive into the House.

I left the Democratic Party, after a lifetime in it, in 2006 when they decided to let more millions be slaughtered for political gain. Now it's much worse even than that. A line in the sand must be drawn, and the big guns need to come out.

Please. Jane's right.

Jane Hamsher's really, really on the right track.

I maybe, probably, should have pointed out how easily his anger has been used against him, too, but people continually become insulted instead of relieved by this sort of information....
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