The PCTC Blog

Cut Your Strings, Stop Being Puppets!

We all have that friend or relative who is so incredibly serious about everything, it makes us laugh. If  you don’t know someone like that, there’s a good chance you're that person within your family or group.

Anyway, this is the person we all love to tweak when we’re in a somewhat aggressive mood, right? I'm not personally mean, but it’s fun sometimes to wind them up by saying something about a subject or issue that you know will make them react,  then sit back and let the fur fly. I have one friend who goes absolutely ballistic whenever I say something negative about President Obama, so I say something bad about him whenever I’m in the mood to wind her up. I don’t mean what I’m saying, either; it’s just fun to watch her go off. She gets very animated and goes on about all the good things the president has done, and she doesn’t even notice my reaction until she sees the grin overtaking my face. It's then that she realizes how silly she’s been (I mean, after all, I wrote a pretty big list of the president’s accomplishments), and she smacks me on the back and tells me to stop it.

This could very well be the best analogy to what the far right does to us continuously. Except for one thing: our side never seems to notice their grin, and never realizes we’ve been had.

Do you really think the Republican Party plans to do away with Medicare? Do you really think they want to be the ones who deprive women of their right to not be abused? For that matter, do you really think they care one little bit about same-sex marriage or reproductive rights? If they were so intent on kowtowing to the gun lobby, why are we still doing background checks? 

If you think their intent is to do all those horrible things the Republican House is proposing, you need to ask yourself why they didn’t pass these laws when they had a chance between 2001 and 2006, when they had total control of the entire apparatus. They could have done so much untold damage in that time, yet all they've really done is given their rich patrons huge tax cuts, then borrowed and spent like drunken teenagers with a no-limit credit card to pay for unwise tax cuts and for shit we didn’t need.

So, why did they wait until they only had control of the House, but not the Senate or the White House? It’s because they know that nothing outrageous that comes out of the House will ever become law. Medicare can’t be killed, because the Senate will not let that happen, and even if a bill slips through there, the president will veto it within seconds, and there is no way such a bill will override. 

Now, if you can’t think of a reason why the Republican Party would propose outrageous bills they know have no chance of passage, then you haven’t been paying attention for the past 40 years.

The main reason they do it is because they know it’ll cause us to react. They know the righteous indignation meter will max out, and we will scream and yell and call them names. And they know this because it's what we always do. For four days now, a large groups of progressives has decided to go after Cory Booker because he said something unwise. Let the Obama campaign handle their people going off the reservation; concentrate on pushing a progressive message.

Okay, so my asshole emits sunshine. Sue me. 

Because so many liberals seem to think we have a solemn duty to go ballistic every time someone says the wrong thing, the right wing knows we'll call for the heads of everyone who would even think of proposing something we don't like, so that's what we do. And we never disappoint; we always react exactly as they expect. Karl Rove and Roger Ailes are sitting in their chairs grinning, and we’re so busy being indignant, and massing to fight something with all of our might, that we don’t even notice the grin.

Yes, folks. We are the marionettes, and Republican strategists are the puppeteers.

Let me tell you why this hurts us.

1. The right wing voters become energized. They love anything that makes us pissed off, and nothing makes them happier than hurting us. They see wounding liberals as their main purpose in life. Think about it; if you know any right wingers, you have never seen them happier than when they think they have us over a barrel. The more pissed off WE are, the more motivated they are to come out and cram the knife in deeper. When we react to every disgusting thing they propose, right wing voters actually get excited.
2. The #1 strategy of the Republican Party in any election is to depress turnout. Nationally, and in most states, Republicans are a significant minority, so they can’t win simply by motivating their own people to come out. They do their best to make people not want to come out and vote at all. When they scream, that has the effect of turning some voters away from the polls. But when we scream their message back at them, we further help them in their main goal. The people who decide elections are not from the left or right, they’re in the middle, and they want to vote for someone who’ll make their lives better. 
3. The "boy who cried wolf" effect kicked in a long time ago. Let's be real; if we treat everything as a crisis, then there are no crises. When we complain about absolutely everything, our complaints come to mean nothing. And when our indignation is complete on every single issue, indignation becomes meaningless. And that leads us to…
4. The most important reason why this hurts us -- It keeps our message from getting out there. Once again, I use this example; if you’re sitting in a park, quietly eating lunch, and two people start screaming at each other, are you more likely to listen closely to what each one is saying, and decide which one is right, or do you ignore both of them, move to another bench and turn up your iPod? If you choose the former, you should know; you’re not normal. No one listens to anyone else who screams. Right wingers don’t win, we lose. And we lose precisely because the right wing message floats out there to depress everyone, and e fail to deliver an alternate message. So, when swing voters are left with a choice of a load of right wing crap on one side and nothing on the other, why would we expect them to put on a heavy coat, travel to the precinct and stand in line for an hour to choose.

For the next few weeks, liberals, take some time out to listen to moderate voter, and discover what they care about. I mean just listen. Don’t ask them leading questions or prod them. Just listen. You’ll find that the biggest complaint from most isn’t that the Republicans are anti-woman, anti-gay and pro-corporation. Their main complaint is that government isn’t working right now. They think the system is too polarized, and no longer meets their needs. Yes, we need more jobs. Yes, we need health care. Yes, everyone should have the same rights as everyone else in every arena. But as long as the right wing is yelling at us and we’re yelling back at them, the average voter has little confidence that either side can fix things. And hot cocoa begins to sound better than voting on a cold November morning.

Keep in mind, a system can't be polarized unless two opposite sides both make it that way.  If the right wing is screaming, and we calmly ignore them and state our case, the polarization goes away. That's how things used to work. It's only been in the last 40 years or so that we came to think it was imperative that we answer every ridiculous notion the right wing puts out there. 

We have to push hope. We have to be the opposite of the right wing in every way. We can't assume they know where we stand on the issues; just tell everyone, and let them tell you whether they've heard it or not. It's so important that we offer a major, palatable altenative to the right wing. Start with positive expressions of liberal/progressive beliefs, like my Progressive Mission Statement, and stop fighting with the rght wing, because it's exactly what they want you to do.

Lose your chains and your strings and play politics to win. It's not ncessary to react to everything they do. In fact, that's exactly why we lose most elections, even though more people are on our side in a democracy. 

To Play Politics Better, You Have to Know What it Is...

One of the biggest problems we liberals have is that a lot of people don’t like us very much. That should make every one of us sad, because we really are the good guys. Even those on the far left whom I’ve been taking n mercilessly over the last year or so are mostly decent people with good hearts; at least those I don’t suspect of being double agents for the far right, anyway.

Unfortunately, caring about people and feeling strongly about an issue doesn’t turn you into a successful politician. If that’s not obvious after watching neocons dominate our political discourse for the last 32 years, then turn in your “political junkie” membership card. 

I made a really simple statement on Twitter the other day. I simply said:

“Issues can be personal, but politics cannot be personal.”

I made the statement based on the assumption that it was relatively non-controversial, but that liberals are so emotional, they need to be reminded of it once in a while. Little did I know the thrashing I would take from self-described “political junkies” for a statement that I know to be absolutely true.

Money Is Important in Politics, But Not As Important as You've Been Told

I’ve taken a lof of heat over the last couple of days, because many lefties are incensed and upset at the Democratic National Committee alleged failure to send $500,000 to support the Wisconsin Recall Walker effort, and I’m not. In fact, I don’t see the point in redirecting funds donated to help us win in 2012 to the state’s effort to fix a mistake they made in 2010. That should be a separate issue, with a separate funding stream.

Once again, the far left is mad at Democrats for not doing what the far left outrage patrol should have been doing all along. I mean, if you knew you needed money to conduct a campaign, why were you not raising it all along? I know for a fact that Recall Walker has been colllecting money; why not just collect more, instead of whining and trashing "the Democrats" again?

This is a crucial election season; a post-Citizens United election season, in fact, in which every dollar raised has to be spent wisely, to take back the House and to keep the Senate, against all odds. It seems to me the people heading the Recall Walker effort should have just assumed that national party money would be hard to come by, and used their impressive grass roots acumen to take the pressure off.

I’m not sure the money is all that necessary, anyway. I know that statement is verging on blasphemy these days, but it's true.

Politics 101 for the Far Left: The Right Doesn't Win, We Lose!

One of the keys to our overall strategy of turning the United States into a progressive nation has to do with our understanding that we are being dominated by a group that represents a significant minority of the American population. The far right in this country represents about 25% of its inhabitants, at most. Yet, for 32 years -- an entire generation -- they’ve been running the government, and we've been increasingly locked out of the government altogether. We even have the most progressive president in the modern era and the single best pure politician in the last 50 yeas lashing out at "the professional left."

And before you professional lefties start laughing at me, consider this; Barack Obama got a black man elected president of the United States, and you think the surest way to a progressive majority is by replacing "Blue Dogs" with teabaggers. We've been in the wilderness for 40 years; how much longer do we shoot ourselves in the foot before we figure out to aim the gun elsewhere?

If we're so great at politics, how is it that a distinct minority of the population can come to dominate the policymaking apparatus in a democratic republic for an entire generation? 

The answer is, we help them.  We actually do more to damage our own prospects than they do. They don't win, we lose. 

Once again, let me explain how we help them.

A Simple Explanation of North Carolina's Amendment 1: Vote AGAINST

If you live in North Carolina, you're about to vote on a ballot measure that is so poorly crafted, it could end up creating chaos in the state. 

The ballot language that voters will face is this: 

Constitutional amendment to provide that marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.

If this measure is approved, it will add the following to Article 14 of the North Carolina Constitution 

	Sec. 6. Marriage. Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.

Right Wingers: So Desperate to Be Relevant, Stupidity Reigns

Sometimes the sheer desperation in the RW's quest for relevance is too funny to pass up. This is a response to my List of President Obama's accomplishments:

From: Mike Garcia [mailto:xxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxx.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2012 4:58 PM
To: milt.shook@gmail.com
Subject: Obama accomplishments

Funny how you're trying to name everything wrong Obamas done to make them seem like positive achievements. Everything listed is not an accomplishment, they are in fact the opposite, or an exaggerated view of a partial fact. The economy is failing, gas is going up, unemployment will average 8% for his first term, and government and their salaries have gone up. Also, it wasn't his plan that found and killed Osama, or brought our troops back. It was him following the initiative that Bush started, these are his own words. But just by reading what you wrote I can see you're not interested in facts, you're just blindly following who will go down in history as the worst president ever. The man who incurred a debt higher than all his predecessors combined. Or maybe you're part of his propaganda crew SEICU, Acorn, or Media Matters. Either way you're credibility and lies are showing. 4 more years of him and we can kiss the American Dream and our way of life goodbye. Maybe that's what you want, in which case he has been successful. The fundumental transformation of America.
I pray he does not...

Sincerely,
Mike G=

 

It is as it does. 

A Move Toward Responsible Capitalism

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” – George Bernard Shaw

I happen to like capitalism. 

When used correctly, with rational regulation to keep the people operating under it working honestly, on a level playing field, capitalism breeds intense innovation, and creates markets for things that make life better. The United States became a superpower because we learned to use the capitalist economic system to its greatest effect, and the world economy is growing and expanding largely by following our lead. 

Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten the formula that got us where we are. We have accepted a false narrative in which capitalism has become something of a religion, with “the market” as its godhead. Too many Americans have come to believe in the basic concept that players in a market will always accede to the wishes of their customers, because that’s how they make money. For example, it seems to be conventional wisdom that food producers won’t allow tainted food into the marketplace because it’s bad for business in the long run. That makes logical sense, as long as someone is in the market for the long haul. But what if a pork producer decides to push some tainted beef into the market, so that people are scared away from beef and opt to buy more pork? 

Why We Lose: This Earth Day Obama Doesn't Beat Climate Change Dead Horse, Left Pounces

I never cease to be amused by the lengths some "liberals" go to in order to bash President Obama. Take this article, from Joe Romm at the Think Progress Green Page, in which he rails about changes in the president’s Earth Day proclamations between last year and this year.  His complaint? That last year’s White House proclamation contained the phrase “climate change,” and this year’s (GASP!) DID NOT!

It’s quite the shocker, isn’t it? Apparently, if Joe Romm doesn’t see the words “climate change” in every annual proclamation, he assumes that no one in government believes it’s actually occurring. This sort of argument reminds me of Bill O’Reilly’s annual lament about the “war against Christmas,” which is based on the retailers' alleged failure to wish everyone a “Merry Christmas.” Apparently, that failure means there is no Christmas in those years.

And no, I’m not exaggerating. This is how Romm starts the article:

You’ll be glad to know that in the last 12 months, that whole climate change problem went away. At least that’s the impression left from comparing President Obama’s 2012 Earth Day proclamation with the 2011 one.

Like I said; if the president doesn’t mention it, Romm thinks people will cease to believe it’s a problem.

"We Have Met The Enemy, Libs, And He Is (Too Often) Us"

If you want to know why the progressive movement keeps spinning its wheels, and why the right wing minority keeps on making policies and having their way, the answer is really simple, and it’s right in front of your face every single day.  

It’s called winning elections. At the very least, it’s making sure the worst people don’t win elections.

We live in a democratic republic. That means “we, the people,” elect those who will make policy and spend our tax money for the next 2-6 years. The people we elect will also have a say in appointing those judges and unelected officials who will interpret the laws and put them into effect. That also means, if we don’t get the most votes, we don’t get to make, or even influence, that policymaking. You don’t win, you don’t play.

Yes, my fellow liberals, that means we have to become popular. Funny thing is, as unpopular as the right wing already is (and they really are!), this task should be easy. Yet, we keep losing elections, because we seem to go out of our way to be as unpopular as possible. The right wing’s message is gloom and doom, because that’s what sells to their ever shrinking base, but too many of the loudest voices on our side have gotten it into their head that shouting gloom and doom from a liberal perspective is the way to win elections.

And I’m sorry, but that’s just crazy. If you don’t believe me, consider our electoral record over the past 32 years. Three-quarters of the electorate is NOT right wing, and yet we keep losing elections. How is that possible?

Progressives for Progress

Why do so many self-described "progressives" not seem to notice that we've been standing outside the political fence for the better part of a half century? The loudest part of the progressive movement seems to like standing outside and shouting at those inside, to see if they'll listen. We hold marches and we parade up and down and we make as much noise as we can, but we don't seem to bother to look up and evaluate the actual progress we're making. 

If the screaming faction of the progressive movement would shut up for a second, sit back and evaluate for a while, they would realize that, for at least the last 32 years, the country has regressed, not progressed, which means we're doing something wrong. 

Universal Health Care Around the World; Most Not What You Think

The misinformation about how health care systems work around the world has been so bad coming from both sides of the aisle, I decided it was time to clear up a few things. Most universal health care systems are not "socialist," as the right wing likes to characterize everything coming from Europe and Asia. But just as importantly, most are also not single-payer systems, contrary to what many on the far left would have you believe, and very few have a "public option" for anyone who isn't on public assistance. 

 

The system created under Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act is under attack precisely because the right wing and left wing both seem to hate the bill. Because of this, polls keep showing that a plurality of Americans want the bill to go away, even though they overwhelmingly favor most of its provisions. Rachel Maddow showed this quite well on her program the other night. No on Obamacare, but yes on most of its provisions is an indication that the progressive message is being lost, again, because the loudest of us don't seem to understand that, when you yell "(insert anything here) sucks!" and then go into a nuanced explanation of why you think it sucks, the only message that actually gets out is the "sucks" part. 

Obamacare is Great Law; Progressives Should Tell Voters What it Does!

Two years ago, President Obama signed into law the most sweeping change in our health insurance system ever. It needs improvement, not replacement. Overall it's a very progressive law. 

Both extremes of the political aisle have spent a lot of time bashing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is usually shortened to “Affordable Care Act,” or “Obamacare”. As a result, even those who realize how bad our health care financing system was before Obamacare passed don't seem to understand what this law does that benefits them. That should trouble real progressives. How can we be progressives, if we are constantly berating actual progress, and causing it to fail?

Obamacare is not perfect law, but it is very progressive.

This law does a lot for people, including those who have the same plan they've had for the last ten years. And believe me when I tell you, the far right wants us to return to the old system, in which health insurance companies were allowed to skim as much as they can off the top of the health care system than even health care providers were getting. Essentially, what we had was the following:

Trayvon Martin and Fear of Black Men: This Happens too Much

I think everyone should be able to agree that freedom should include being able to walk down the street innocently without being shot. When it does happen, freedom should include authorities seeking justice for your death. While some are using the example of using drone strikes to take out people who are committed to mass killings of Americans (and it’s a valid question to be debated), few if any of those same people are using the same energy to confront a problem that is far more threatening to the freedoms of a great many more people, and which is far more common. Apparently, black men are so threatening to the (mostly white) populace that they are being shot with alarming frequency, and many are getting away with it. We all know “Driving While Black” is a crime in a number of jurisdictions. But “walking while black” apparently too often carries a death sentence.

One thing that bothers me most about the shooting of Trayvon Martin is that it doesn’t seem to bother enough people.

The short version of the story is, on February 26, Trayvon and his father were visiting friends, who live in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, a community near Orlando. Trayvon, who was black, decided to take a walk to the local 7-11. As he was coming back, a 28-year-old white “neighborhood watch captain” in an SUV, George Zimmerman, decided the unarmed black teenager pictured here looked “suspicious”, and called 911. The 911 dispatcher promised to send police and told Zimmerman to do nothing. Zimmerman apparently ignored the admonition and went after the kid anyway. Trayvon was armed with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman was armed with a 9mm handgun. By the time police arrived, Trayvon was lying face down in the grass, fatally wounded in the chest.

Again, that was February 26, and to date, Zimmerman is free, and there is talk that he may skate by claiming self-defense. Yes, self-defense. A 28-year-old man was so AFRAID of that 17-year-old kid that Florida authorities will let him stay a free man.

Now, I want you to read up on this case, because it’s fascinating. Listen to the 911 calls, which are chilling, because they show Martin calling for help before being shot. Also, you should call everyone you can, and demand that this Zimmerman person pay with a considerable amount of time in a prison. Here is a list of authorities to contact to do so.  There’s a lot of talk about this case right now, finally, after three weeks of inaction by Sanford, Florida police. But what’s most bothersome about this case is that it’s not as unique as it should be. As I said, black men are still really scary to white people and police, and that fear apparently creates something of a license to kill.

Government, wealth, and jobs

I'm sure you've heard the claims many times:

1) Government can't create jobs

2) Government can't create wealth

3) Government workers are just overheard, and a drain on the economy

Variations of this quasi-hardline-libertarian material have been promulgated ad nauseum over the last few years.  We heard it this very morning, as Senator John McCain claimed on Meet The Press that government can't create jobs.

Other lawmakers and Right Wing commentators have gone full in with all three claims, of course.

So, is there any truth to them?  In a word, "no".

Building on a Swamp

There’s a great scene in the classic film, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” in which the owner of Swamp Castle describes how he built it. The first two castles sank into the swamp, of course, as castles built on swamps are wont to do, but the third one, by God, stayed up (so far), possibly because it was sitting on the first two sunken castles.

Besides the laugh, there’s something to be learned there. If you want to build something that lasts, you can’t ignore the foundation upon which it’s built.

My dear idealistic progressives, your ideals are wonderful. You and I probably share most of them. But if you have a sincere desire to build a great progressive movement in this country, you have to realize that we can’t do it quickly, and we can’t do it without paying attention to the foundation that’s in place. Wanting something and doing what’s necessary to get it are two different things.

Like it or not, progressives, our side has been politically negligent for at least 40 years. During that time, while we’ve made progress on some fronts, but we’ve lost a lot of ground on many others. Over the last 32 years, a neocon minority has had control of a large portion of the government, including six years in which they ran and ruined everything they could get their hands on.

Black-and-White (Binary) Progressives

One of the reasons the right wing is so incredibly irritating, and why their policy decisions are generally so bad is precisely because their rank-and-file followers think about everything in black-and-white terms They are largely incapable of thinking in shades of gray.

Consider their positions on issues. Taxes are always too high, so tax cuts are always good, while tax increases on anyone are wrong, regardless of ability to pay. Abortion is wrong, so abortion should be illegal, and we should throw everyone in jail who has one or performs one. Sex is dirty and wrong, therefore anything that makes sex safer or more enjoyable, such as contraception, is also wrong, at least for women. Homosexuality is “unnatural,” so allowing gays to be “just like us” is akin to condoning the unnatural. 

You get the drift. Everything is either good or bad, there is no rhyme or reason to anything they claim to believe, politically. What’s worse, they believe in their nonsense so completely, they can’t tolerate dissent. They also need constant affirmation, which is why Fox News is the top-rated cable “news” outlet, and why talk radio is dominated by media whores who make a whole lot of money reassuring right wingers with a black-and-white mentality that they’re not alone.

Such is the case with political extremists of all stripes. We have our own such thinkers, and we’ve developed names for them. The black-and-white thinking progressives have come to be called “emo,” while those who make money catering to them are usually called the “professional left.” These people buy into certain memes, and won’t even consider alternatives, regardless of the sense they make. Like black-and-white thinkers on the right, they tend to be very loud, and very insistent that their way is the only correct way. Unfortunately, they tend to be so loud, and so in-your-face, they often come to represent “the left,” or “liberals” or “progressives.

Black-and-white thinking is politically ruinous for our side of the political spectrum, because it’s inherently negative. You see, the vast majority of voters are rational, and realize that nothing in the world is either all bad or all good. Because the Republican Party is a minority party, they can use the negative energy produced by their black-and-white thinking base to drive down turnout, which gives them a better chance to win. Unfortunately, the liberal black-and-white thinking contingent also drives down turnout, which hurts the progressive cause mightily.

Below are a few of the more common black-and-white issues pushed by the left, and how we can refute this stuff, take back the dialogue, and win the debate.

• Blue Dog Democrats prevented progress the last session of Congress.

I can’t believe anyone is dumb enough to believe this.

No, Blue Dogs are not my favorite people on Earth. But until we educate people and push progressive politics to the point that we have more than 218 hardcore progressive districts, the fact of the matter is, we need Blue Dogs. We need a majority of Democrats in Congress, and at this point in our history, the only way to get that is to run conservative-leaning Democrats in conservative districts. If we demanded that only hardcore progressives run for office as a Democrat, we’d be lucky to get 50-60 seats in the House and perhaps 15 in the Senate.

I’m really hearing this from Black-ad-White progessives and the professional left when they talk about about Bob Kerrey, who is now running for Ben Nelson’s seat in Nebraska. I'm not saying Bob Kerrey is a hardcore progressive, but if you know anything about Nebraska politics, you have to know that a Dennis Kucinich-type isn’t going to win a statewide race there. It’s simply not possible to expect progressives to win races in conservative districts. And when Blue Dogs win and start governing, they have no choice but to throw a few high-profile bones to their constituents. In reaity, there are no cases of Blue Dogs strongly supporting a filibuster of a major Democratic bill, and there are no cases of a Blue Dog casting a deciding vote on a bill a majority of Democrats felt strongly about. In most cases, Blue Dogs tended to only vote against a bill once they were sure Speaker Pelosi assured them she had enough votes to pass. Plus, during the 2009-2010 Congressional session, all but one Blue Dog voted with Democrats 80% of the time. Compare that to the teabaggers who replaced them after the 2010 election. 

The reason so many bills failed in the last session of Congress was because 40-41 Republican Senators worked as a solid bloc to filibuster pretty much everything Democrats liked. It was Republicans who blocked all those bills, not Blue Dog Democrats.

Politically speaking, most voters don’t hear you railing about Blue Dog Democrats, they only hear “Democrats.” Therefore, when emo progressives and the professional left trash Blue Dogs, they are essentially trashing “the Democrats.” If both sides are saying “Democrats suck,” and they already know right wing Republicans suck, why would they vote, let alone vote for a Democrat? If you want to know why we lost Russ Feingold and Alan Grayson in 2010, this is why.

• Corporations are bad. Bigger corporations are really bad.

This could very well be the gross generalization that does the most damage to progressive politics, and there are a number of reasons for it, not the least of which is that it’s too simplistic. There are more than 27.5 million businesses in this country, and a large number of them are incorporated. Incorporation is a rational way to organize a business, because it protects the owners from liability, makes it easier to transfer ownership when it becomes necessary, and there are tax benefits.

Most private sector workers toil for a corporation or similar entity. When a black-and-white thinking “progressive” rails about the “evils” of corporations, they are actually insulting a large number of potential voters. Not only that, but when you recklessly trash all corporations, you do a lot of damage to the progressive movement, since most swing voters work for corporations that aren't all that bad.  

There's a major difference between ExxonMobil, BP or DuPont and Ben & Jerry’s, Credo Mobile or AFLAC. There’s a huge difference between how CostCo and Walmart treat their employees. Most of those nice little restaurants and shops you like to frequent to support the local community are probably incorporated.

As with everything, there are many good corporations, as well as a good number of bad ones. And because of market forces, the pressure on corporations to cut corners to maximize profits makes it absolutely necessary to regulate them. But nothing about corporations is either inherently bad or good, and our generalizations about them hurt the progressive cause.

• President Obama is a “corporatist” because he isn’t putting the people who ran banks during the mortgage meltdown in prison and he’s not breaking up the banks.

The black-and-white crowd uses the lack of "bankster" prosecutions as proof that President Obama is a “corporatist,” whatever the hell that means. As usual, this fails as a black-and-white issue. In fact, there are so many people who deserve blame for the collapse of the economy, it’s difficult to look at one set, and put it all on them.

The actions that led to the Great Recession came contained in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, passed in 1999. That bill essentially repealed Glass-Steagall and removed most regulation from the banking system. What this means is, most of what bankers did during the period leading to the collapse of the economy was largely legal. Simply put, the Department of Justice can’t convict anyone of a non-crime.

It is also extremely time-consuming to prosecute cases involving large sums of money. It isn’t unusual for financial fraud cases to take four to five years of intense investigation before they even convene a grand jury. I’ve seen cases that took upwards of eight years to get to that point. They can’t prosecute anyone just because something happened, and they’re pretty sure they know who did it. Prosecutors need a little something called “evidence.” And poring through millions of pages of financial documents to detect problems and patterns is an incredibly time-consuming process.

The black-and-white thinkers also demand that Obama break up banks, I would ask these keen minds how, exactly, the President of the United States goes about breaking up private corporations, just because he thinks they should be broken up. Keep in mind; that’s our money in those banks, and there is no obligation on our part to keep the money there. Should the president have the power to make you switch banks, based on his perception of the size of the corporate structure supporting the bank? And how does that square with their contention that presidents have “too much power” in some areas?

Rationality and logic are not hallmarks of the average black-and-white thinking "progressive."

• President Obama is “targeting American citizens” with accelerated drone attacks.” He is also “targeting civilians in Pakistan.”

When rational people hear this, they get an image of President Obama sending drones into towns full of Republicans to make sure they can’t beat him in the next election. The source of this black-and-white statement, however, is the targeted assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about Awlaki, except to say that the guy was apparently working with al Qaeda and he did call for jihad against the United States. None of us has exact details, because we don’t have the intelligence reports President Obama receives). Yemen was aware of our operations to weed out al Qaeda within the country, because they assisted on a previous raid designed to take out Awlaki. 

Also, Awlaki's status as an American citizen is pretty much a technicality. Awlaki was born here, but he and his family moved back to Yemen when he was very young, and he attended college in Colorado on a Yemeni scholarship and a foreign student visa, by lying and telling authorities he was born there. So, he’s a Yemeni in spirit, who just happened to be born in the United States. Put simply, it's a distinction without a difference. 

More galling is the implication that Obama is “targeting civilians”. The image is that he’s ordering drones to take out villages or some such nonsense. If true, such a thing would be inexcusable. But it’s not true. According to statistics most often cited by the professional left, in 260 drone strikes in three years, between 282-535 civilians have been killed. That total is dwarfed by the number of militants that have been killed, which is in the thousands. Here's another data source; note that the number of drone attacks last year was one-third less than the year before, and the number this year is on track to be half that number. In other words, even the word “accelerated” is exaggerated. 

It takes a black-and-white mind to complain in one breath about the war in Afghanistan, and also complain about drone strikes that take out mostly militants. In this very gray world, there are a number of groups who would love to come over here and do us harm, en masse. There is no denying that. And ignoring that threat, as the terrorist attacks back in 2001 showed us, is not an option. There are bad people out there, who intend to kill men, women and children by the thousands and tens of thousands, and they must be stopped. I’m a pacifist, and in a perfect world, I would love to be able to send the FBI into Yemen and arrest people like Awlaki, but it’s not realistic. Hell, it’s not even possible to bring in dangerous people here. Numerous times each year, domestic police agencies have to kill suspects before trial, because that’s the only way to eliminate the threat. 

I understand that black-and-white thinkers have a problem with any war of any type, but the fact is we live in a violent, unsettled world, and if we are going to be true pacifists – I mean peace at any cost – then we have to understand that, sometimes, creating true piece requires us to get rid of those who wish to disrupt the peace. Ideally, it would be nice to round them all up and throw them in jail, but that’s not always possible. If you can save tens of thousands or even millions of lives by taking a few hundred, or even a few thousand lives, what kind of “pacifist” are you if you don’t take that chance?

If you can’t imagine shooting Hitler and his henchmen in 1936 if you had a chance, in order to save millions of lives, then you’re not really a pacifist.

• “Centrists” (and anyone who’s not a hardcore progressive) lack “principle.”

I hate the word “centrist,” because there really is no such thing. If someone actually occupies the exact “center” of the political debate, we don’t know who it is. It’s basically the emo left’s version of calling everyone “liberal” who doesn’t agree with them. I am so sick of being called a “centrist” because I’m smart enough to realize that progressive ideas don’t just happen because you want them, or that all the greatest intentions in the world are worthless without a rational political strategy. I’m not a “centrist.” I fall down far onto the liberal side of the fence, and I am unabashedly liberal on every single issue. What makes some folks think I’m “centrist” has to do with their absurd black-and-white vision of the world, and their lack of acceptance of anything that doesn’t fit their worldview, which isn’t even a view of the real world.

Elections are not decided by either extreme; they're decided by those good folks who occupy a huge swath of ideological territory between the extreme left and the extreme right. These folks don’t lack principle; they dimply have principles that differ from yours. This is how the world works, folks; every single one of us has a different set of experiences, and a different way of looking at the world. No one is 100% left or 100% right. Think about the liberals who would love nothing better than knocking every right wing talker off the air (not very liberal of you, is it?) and the right wingers who demand that government keep their hands off the most successful socialist enterprise in US history, Medicare. Even pacifists would kill an intruder to save their family, and the most hawkish folks worry about their family members serving in war zones, and want them to come home alive.

The key to political success is in building consensus in the democratic process on as many of the issues that face us as possible. The real lack of principle comes from people who think in terms of black-and-white. Principle requires you to listen to and understand every situation, and do the right thing based on that situation. If you are incapable of doing that, you’re not as principled as you’ve deluded yourself into thinking you are. It’s not “principled” to pick a position and stick with that position no matter what transpires. That’s petulance, or obstinance. If a five year old kid wants a candy bar, and won’t stop screaming until he gets it. we don’t call him “principled,” we call him a brat. Likewise, if you are still complaining about health care reform plan because it doesn’t have a “public option,” you’re not “principled.” A “principled” person would have stopped complaining a long time ago, assessed the situation, and realized that we needed more Democrats and fewer Republicans to get a “public option” done. That’s principle in action.

 

I have so many more examples of this, but this is long enough. Black-and-White thinking “progressives” are killing the movement, and they’re blocking actual progress. It has to stop.

Pro Lefty Uses Bovine Fecal Foundation to Manufacture Outrage Against... Obama?

One of the problems with the concept of "manufacturing outrage" is that many of its biggest manufacturers build it out of bovine fecal matter.  

If one was to read or listen to some on the professional left, one might think President Obama was routinely rounding up Americans and throwing them in secret prisons, or that he's become a rogue agent, targeting US citizens all over the world and taking them out with drones. It would actually be funny, if such rhetorical garbage didn't make the entire progressive side of the aisle look like a bunch of idiots. Consider this, folks; when people read progressive media, then figure out Obama's actually doing no such thing, what do you think happens to their opinion of progressive media?

Whether you like it or not, we are in a fight with terrorists. While I disagree with the concept of calling it a "war," because theword is misleading and too easy to manipulate, there really are rogue bands of thugs who would like nothing better than to commit another attack as they did on 9/11, or something far worse, and kill as many of us as possible. Some scenarios, like the concept of someone carrying a nuclear bomb in a briefcase or backpack, are absurd. But there is no doubt that like plots are being planned as we speak. And while they call themselves "freedom fighters," it's absolutely unclear whose "freedom" they're "fighting for." They seem to be little more than religious extremists, with zero political affiliation, except to other extremists.