Conservative groups routinely make the same sorts
of mistakes, but they don’t generally result in such massive losses.
Why? Because conservative activists are not in the business of
challenging entrenched power. Progressives have to remember that we run
an oppositional movement, even with a Democratic president of color in
the White House. We are fundamentally about changing the dominant way
society is set up, and that will always make us a more likely target of
attack than those working merely to maintain the status quo.
And also?They have more time on their hands. They have time for smear campaigns, voter intimidation, general mayhem and total stupidity. They’re not trying to make anything. They’re not trying to build anything. They’re not trying to register voters because all their mouthbreathing teabaggers already vote, and they’re not trying to bring communities together because all their communities already are together, behind big shiny gates that lock with a very loud click. They have room in their heads for schemes like “let’s pretend to be a pimp and a ho” and “let’s get a bunch of bitter old Nixon bag men cockroaches together and make commercials” and “let’s put a story out there Al Gore wears weird colors” and shit. It’s very easy to come up with that crap when the whole “how is the food gonna get on the table” dilemma is solved for you. Gives you ever so much room to breathe.
Plus they’re BFFs with a bitchy and compliant media so afraid of missing a trend if you pitched the idea that kids today are eating feces for fun it would be on the evening news three weeks running before anybody ever asked for proof.
A.
And also further: they have more money. To paraphraseThe Usual Suspects, they’re funded from on high by the devil himself, in many cases.
But lazy liberals with no jobs are living off welfare and have the Armies of Acorn!
life under georgee must have really been swell for them.
If you’re paid to foster political mayhem, paid to disseminate lies and half-truths, if you’re paid to be a ratfucker, if you’re paid to schmooze with the media and get reporters’ Rolodexes full of your friends’ names, it’s not just a matter of having time–your time is paid for to do those things, by wingnut welfare.
In aggregate, corporate power has become immense. I don’t think anyone, let alone the Founders, could have seen far enough into the future to predict what the effects of corporate money and television would have on politics, society and governance.
They could have predicted, I think, though, the sort of people determined to obtain that power and to use money to get it.
Wait, didn’t Okeefe plead out?
Wait, didn’t Okeefe plead out?
Last I heard, the government had reduced the charge to a misdemeanor, but, no plea, as yet, AFAIK.
But, you can be rather sure that this young man with the rather snotty and cavalier attitude toward justice won’t be spending any time in Angola, or a federal prison.