Congratulations, Jack, But You're Still An Asshole

You beat a DINO. A Conserva-dem. A Blue Dog. A racist, misogynistic, homophobic, coal-worshipping, cradle-robbing republican.

If you try to beat the real republican in November by running as the same kind of repug-lite you just defeated, you're going to lose.

You're going to lose huge.

Unless you embrace the Real Democrats who held our noses and voted for you as the best chance to take back Wendell Ford's seat, you're going to lose huge.

As I wrote back in March, when you'd blown a 2009 lead and were 20 points down:

You can't out-DINO Mangy, and you can't out-repug AynRandPaul. You're 20 points down and falling. You have one option and one option only: go the full liberal monty.

There's a precedent of a full-blooded liberal winning in a repug district: Alan Grayson in Orlando. Not even the Old Fifth is more conservative than Orlando.

Come out in favor of health care reform, but only to get a basic bill in place that can be quickly amended into single-payer. Medicare For All!

Tell Big Coal thanks for keeping our state in feudal dependence for 200 years, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. We're taking all those tax subsidies you've been wasting and building a renewable energy industry that will put China to shame.

Demand a massive, $2-trillion jobs bill that will put 10 million people to work on public projects immediately.

Demand tight regulation that will prevent Wall Street from defrauding a single investor ever again.

Insist on reversing the last decade of stealing taxes from the middle class to further enrish the obscenely wealthy: return tax rates to those during Ronald Reagan's administration. That will drop the deficit by about half.

Demand immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a radical restructuring of the defense budget. That's another half of the deficit gone.

Say all of this loudly, proudly and repeatedly. Call Mangy a coward for abandoning Democratic principles and values, and AynRandPaul a tool of the teabaggers and their corporate masters.

Seriously, Jack, you have nothing left to lose. You keep running as a pale republican, the primary is not the only thing you're going to lose; it'll be the end of your political career.

You won the primary yesterday because in the last eight weeks you did take a few steps to separate yourself from Conservadem Mangy. But less than a third of Kentucky Democrats turned out for the primary. You're going to have to do a lot more to prove yourself a Real Democrat if you're going to light the kind of fire under Democrats that it's going to take to regain Wendell Ford's Senate seat.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....