Bummer

The answer instead is very simple, and very depressing: They’re fucking cowards.

Afuckingmen!

And on THAT note, I think I’ll have a beer.

They’ll be afraid to thump their chests about this poll because they already know how the GOP will respond, and that response will make them look bad because there’s going to be a bit of truth to it, so they don’t want the blowback, and they don’t have the guts to go on the attack. So, they’ll fucking sit on this and be humble about it when if the situation were reversed, every GOP would have this graphic stapled to their foreheads and simply point to it whenever anyone opposed them.

The Dems are going to sound like whiners. I know it. They’re going to use this for a pity party and say the other side doesn’t play fair, and that’s why nothing is going to get done. Instead, they should send everyone with a pulse onto every show for the next month and scream, THE GOP IS STOPPING US FROM CARRYING OUT THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE BECAUSE THEY HATE AMERICA.

I love my party, but they drive me fucking NUTS. They need to stop playing by the rules.

Also, when the GOP gets on their “Obamabot and media conspiracy” high horse, they should turn it around and say, “Wow, you must think we’re really powerful if you’re saying we’ve pulled off the greatest conspiracy in the history of politics. I wish we were that amazing, but really it’s just that we’re on the side of America and you are a jihadist.”

Sorry, this has gotten me all riled up. They need to come out fighting. They need to say, look, stand aside, you’re getting in the way of what the people want. Why can’t they do that? Why can’t they say, we’re winning, you’re losing, stand aside and let us lead? Why can’t they see that we’re in a new era of politics? This poll cold be a defining moment that changes the tide forever, and it’s going to be moot after the day’s news cycle.

@RomeGirl: They’re animals, conditioned to grunt and howl in response to anything that diverges from the RNC mantras of zero taxation and zero regulation. There’s no conversation to be had with them. Obama has to get Cheney and Bush and Co in the doc and get convictions for treason – who knows what may come out of the legal attacks on Blackwater? – and get them in front of a firing squad. The only thing that will tame these freaks is seeing their leaders splintered into wet chunks by rifle fire and watching Obama pick up their dismembered heads and hold them up for everyone to see who the fuck is in charge now. That, that these animals would understand. They’d quiet down after that and go back to beating their wives, making crystal meth and fucking goats.

@FlyingChainSaw: While I could touch myself thinking of a kind of uber-sinister Watergate scenario pushed through time and space and Cheney’s colon to become Blackwatergate – a name fitting on so many levels I’m practically fapping as I write – it saddens me to think that not even something like that would tame them, but instead would incite them to further outrage as taught to them by the people who say the sky is not blue, but crimson red. They are straight out of 1984. In fact, I’d like to reread that right about now.

I’d love to have an open thread in which we all discuss in all sincerity the logistics of secession. I want that poll graphic to become the foundation for a study about breaking up this dysfunctional family once and for all.

@RomeGirl: Oh, I think the goatfuckers would LOVE the idea that Blackwater randomly murdered and raped the mud people and would cheer the company on in those depraved enterprises. What I am hoping will come out are stories about Blackwater execs summarily executing American armed services personnel who they needed to silence.

They’re going nowhere until the military-industrial-Congressional complex is dismantled. All the armed forces domestic bases are in goatfucker states.

@FlyingChainSaw: Oh. I forgot all the big-boy toys are in the goatfucker states. That might present a problem for the whole secession idea. They’d bomb everybody.

Although it’d be fun to see Jesusland become the world’s enemy.

Really? Talibunny as prime minister of the Confederate States of America punching the launch codes to take out Paris and New York sounds like fun?

@RomeGirl: Although it’d be fun to see Jesusland become the world’s enemy.

@FlyingChainSaw: OK, no, not fun. But in a SEE, WE TOLD YOU THEY WERE NUTBAGS kind of fun. Just to have that relaxing feeling of being completely vindicated before being annihilated kind of fun. Just 10 fucking seconds of them not being our problem kind of fun.

@RomeGirl: Yeah, except now it sounds like an India/Pakistan style partition. And that was such a raging success.

I agree that the Dems need to grow a set. Lloyd Doggett, one of the few proud liberals in Congress, was talking about the town hall meeting he had in Austin where the bused-in tea baggers were screaming at him and holding up signs with his tombstone on it and he said that if people want health care reform they should speak up. No, Lloyd, grow a fucking set and tell the GOP to fuck off. The Dems have been running on this issue for 17 years, they have a huge fucking majority in the Senate and the House, and Barry needs to just say “Lemme whip out this plan” and get it done with. There is no middle ground with these wingnuts on this issue – just like there is no middle ground with them when it comes to abortion or civil rights. The GOP doesn’t play by the rules, nor should the Dems. That’s what I thought Rahm was around for.

Not surprising. Even the Libruls up north have a set (not sure about current leader Iggy.) Our semi-corrupt former leader Jean Cretien gave a serious smackdown to a protester when he got in his face despite RCMP “security.”

Many of the current Dems (blue dogs and the current leadership) need to learn to throw a punch instead of doing a Buster Bluth and curling up into a ball.

@SanFranLefty: YES! Rahm needs to get all Josh Lyman on their asses. They need to scream poll results, which say that everyone actually wants reform, from the rooftops. They need to yell loud and long and shrieky every time the GOP says their tagline about someone getting in between you and your doctor. They need to truck out the people who told all those horrific stories on the govt website about horrific healthcare to contrast to the GOP yelling about everyone in Canada dying because of socialized medicine or whatever the hell they say. They need to make this about PASS REFORM OR THE BABIES DIE.

They need Jon Stewart to be the Press Secretary. There, I said it.

@RomeGirl: http://iraqforsale.org/

The Dems are not cowards. Corrupt, inept, incompetent–yes–but they’re not cowards. Exhibit A: The largest, most blatant, fraudulent, regressive theft/wealth transfer in world history has been going on for nearly a year–and it’s accelerating. There are endless additional examples.

They mostly want the same things the Republicans do, there are only stylistic differences, and neither party has any interest in actually governing. That’s why the real progressive agenda is dead in the water.

This poll should be taken with a grain lick of salt, to say the least. A lot of people in Southern states identify as Democrats but vote solidly Republican. For example, let’s look at my home state of Kentucky and its almost-neighbor Arkansas (there are probably other examples, but these come to mind). Gallup says Democrats have a 16-point advantage in Kentucky, and a 15-point one in Arkansas. Now, let’s see how those two states voted last fall:

Kentucky
McCain: 57.4%
Obama: 41.2%
Other: 1.4%

Arkansas
McCain: 58.7%
Obama: 38.9%
Other: 1.4%

The last time they went blue was for Clinton, though it was close in Kentucky in 1992 and even closer in 1996 (the closest of the election, in fact, at a less than 1% margin of victory), and Arkansas was obviously a special case.

@mellbell: Well, honey, that’s because a black Mooslem furriner was running. And before that we had a windsurfing French-speaking man who hates America.

@RomeGirl: Maybe 1984 should be the Stinque Book Club’s next selection?

@SanFranLefty:
Lord of the Flies?

@SanFranLefty: @ManchuCandidate: I like both choices. I actually read them the same year, summer of 1984, of my own volition because that’s how I rolled as a 13-year-old book nerd. I’d like to revisit them both given my undeniable wisdom, maturity and properly developed worldview.

@blogenfreude: – So, that’s what the end of the world is going to look like.

They’re not all cowards. Some of them are just corrupt, and all to eager to sell out to the drug industry (for instance), for a pocket full of campaign cash.

@RomeGirl: Hello sister book nerd – I too read 1984 in the summer of 1984 – isn’t that what everyone reads between 6th and 7th grades?

@SanFranLefty: The summer of ’84 was between my last year in grammar school and my first year in high school, so I didn’t have any summer reading lists. It actually was never assigned in any of my classes ever! Lord of the Flies was assigned my freshman (HS) year, if I remember correctly.

@RomeGirl: Oh, it wasn’t on my summer reading list at school – Orwell was too subversive for the schools I attended.

@Serolf Divad: It’s not cowardice if you stand up for your principles. The problem, as Serolf points out, is that the Demos’ core principles are weak-assed, corrupt, or both.

@SanFranLefty: I think it was the one-two pulled punch of Doggett and Waxman that set me off.

Jon Stewart asks Waxman a simple question last night: Why are the cap&trade and health bills 1200 pages each? Since this has been a GOP talking point for weeks, any Demrat on TV should have a prepared bullet-point answer: “Well, Jon, let’s break it down: 50 pages are for this, 50 pages for that. We’d like to write them shorter, but we’re up against folks who live for loopholes, so we need to nail it down tight.”

Or something. Anything. Fight back, dammit! Don’t whine about staged protests — do something about them!

@mellbell: I agree. One must take any poll that claims Texas and Arizona are competitive with a block of salt.

@Jamie Sommers: Granted, but just to be clear — this isn’t a single poll, but the cumulative result of six months of polling.

@nojo: It’s not that it’s inaccurate, in the sense of actually reflecting how people self-identify, but that it has little bearing on how they actually vote.

I finally finished the whole Oregon driver’s license/voter registration yesterday, and had the hardest time marking “Democrat” in party affiliation for particularly this reason.

If the representatives aren’t bought and paid for by someone else, they are unable to actually fucking articulate a manifesto that advocates the good things government can and should do, and do it in a way that’s convincing. You’d think after 40 years of the GOP doing nothing but scream “GUBMINT BAD!” we’d have developed a compelling, alternative narrative to push.

this is how bad it is:
all my hopes are pinned on al franken.

@baked: Mine are too! That’s not bad. Mr. SFL and I had this discussion last night that Franken appears to us to be the only one in Congress who seems to have the ovaries/balls to speak truth to power and call the GOP for the dipshits they are.

@SanFranLefty: Well, he did. It remains to be seen whether that will continue now that he’s part of the problem Senate.

@SanFranLefty:
by bad i mean, as you said, he’s the ONLY one.

@Jamie Sommers:
yes, i have that same worry. he certainly has the balls, let’s pray they don’t shrivel in the chamber.

@baked, @SanFranLefty, @Jamie Sommers:

Perhaps someone could talk Bill Maher into running against DiFi?

Now that would be a fucking campaign. Think of the press releases!

@Signal to Noise:

We don’t have to specify affiliation on our ballot registration here in WA, but if we did, I would have changed it to “independent” after 2007, and I say this as an all-Dem ticket voter since age 18. I’m done with them.

@Original Andrew: I’m the grandson of a union organizer, and I’m a registered independent. I’ll vote for them, but I sure as hell won’t identify with them.

@nojo: @Original Andrew: Since you can’t vote in any party’s primary in CA as in some states, I’m a registered Dem because this is such a one-party town*, the primary is the only place where there’s any action.

*Despite Libertarian Tool’s best efforts to change that.

@Signal to Noise: I am an anti-Republican. “D” will do for voter registration.

@SanFranLefty: Same here. Democratic supermajority + closed primary + requirement that the two at-large seats up for grabs every election cycle be held by members of different parties (meaning registered Independents and Republicans bear the brunt of campaign efforts) = registered Democrat.

@Original Andrew: @nojo: @redmanlaw:

I’m not quite sure how it works here in Oregon yet, but having been a CA voter prior, I suspect I marked the box this time for the D’s just to make sure I could participate in the primary rounds. It did take me a minute to decide at the DMV, though — it used to be automatic.

i’ve been registered independent for a very long time.
as lewis black says: the republicans are a party of bad ideas, the democrats are a party of no ideas.