Embrace the All-Powerful Left

The extent and ridiculousness of repug lies about non-conservatives requires a variety of responses. The most outrageous - Michelle Obama will have you arrested for not cooking vegetables - have to be ignored. Others - Barack Obama is a socialist - are best mocked through exaggeration: "No, he's a communist! Worse than Marx! He's Castro's love child!"

Then there are the lies that are useful. Especially when they come from our supposed allies.

Via Down with Tyranny, Ian Welsh on turning the latest hippie-punching into a weapon:

Look, if the left is so powerful that it is responsible for Democratic fortunes, well, that’s not something we should shrink from. We should say, “Yes, we can destroy Democratic prospects. If you don’t do what we want, we WILL do so.”

Powerful groups get what they want, weak groups don’t. If the White House wants to portray us as that powerful, we should embrace that description, because it is a blade which cuts both ways.

And there is an argument for it. While certainly the economy is factor one, the people whom left-wing bloggers reach are the sort of folks who traditionally don’t just vote, they volunteer, they give money and they are themselves influentials, who convince others to be enthusiastic, vote, volunteer and give. When, last year, I felt parts of the blogosphere lose their patience with Obama, I knew it would cost him, and it has.

Don’t run from this, embrace it, wrap yourself in it. You are part of the left, and the left is capable of destroying governments which don’t do what it wants. And this is good, because objectively Obama has not fixed the economy, has presided over further destruction of civil rights, has reduced access to abortion, and so on.

Powerful people and interests give away nothing they don’t want to unless they are forced to by others with power. The left is either powerful and willing to use that power or it is nothing.

Ken adds:

I like it! Until now the right-wing Dem "centrists" have acted on the assumption that we can be abused with impunity.

Meanwhile, I wish I had the courage to say, "To hell with them," and hunker down to live with the dreadfulness it's safe to say will come with the sweeping out of the Democratic weasels, while contemplating the work that will be needed to try to build a viable alternative to the Republican death spiral.

The one thing I can continue to urge on all kindred souls is to work like the dickens and contribute to the max to elect good new Dems, and to save the good ones like Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer and Alan Grayson who face the possibility of being swept up in the flooding of the swamp. You know, the people Howie has been writing about here, and that he and our friends Digby and John Amato have made official Blue America endorsees.

In this brave new world, we can at last face them down, in the name of sanity, the way the loonies of the Right have been doing for decades now, in the name of craziness and indecency, to Republican mandarins. Let's say it all together:

“Yes, we can destroy Democratic prospects. If you don’t do what we want, we WILL do so.”

As so many others have written: republicans fear their base; Democrats despise theirs. Time liberals did some fearmongering of our own.