Post by bootsynaples on Nov 9, 2012 19:17:23 GMT -5
Dear Republicans,
We know that this is a difficult time for you right now, and that you are still in shock over an election that you were so certain that you were going to win. As impolite as it might be to say "we told you so", it has to be said that.... well, we told you so.
We tried to warn you that your idols on FOX News and AM Radio were lying to you. We tried to warn you that most Americans are repelled by ideological extremism, no matter from which side it comes. We tried to warn you that an incumbent president has vast structural advantages when it comes to re-election, especially when his party has won the popular vote in four of the last five elections.
Sadly for you, and fortunately for us, you wouldn't listen. You convinced yourselves that the rest of America felt exactly the same as you, and shared your antipathy towards this President. You convinced yourselves that the millions who voted for President Obama in 2008 only did so because we wanted a black President, or because we were voting against George W. Bush, or because he had star quality, or because we wanted a handout.
Then as now, you demonstrated how little you understand about the majority of your fellow countrymen who think differently from you.
So if you ever develop the circumspection to ask yourselves why your side got shellacked in 2008, and why it happened again this year, allow us to lay it out for you.
The American people don't like it when you call them lazy scroungers just because they have different political views from you. Especially when those people run the gamut of American society, from business leaders to single mothers who are working three minimum-wage jobs to feed their families.
Women don't like it when your ideological leaders call them sluts. Neither do they like it when old, white men in your party try repeatedly to defund the healthcare providers upon which many of them rely. And they certainly don't like it when your candidates tell them that rape won't get them pregnant because they have secret female mechanisms to prevent that. The war over sexual equality has been long decided, and you lost it decades ago. America is not going back to the 1950s, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner we can all move on.
African-Americans don't like it when you keep using the same racist, dog-whistle phrases to attack them as those you used during the segregationist era. If you don't think African-Americans know you're attacking them when you mock "Chicago politics" or "food stamps" or "Detroit", then you underestimate the intelligence of African-Americans. One more thing. They don't particularly like it either when you use such terms to attack the first African-American president in our history. Pointing at token African-American Republicans like Allen West or Clarence Thomas to demonstrate your racial tolerance isn't going to fix the damage you've already done.
Latinos don't like it when your presidential candidate talks about "self-deportation", or when he browns up his face before he panders to them on Univision. Once again, Marco Rubio isn't the answer to your problems with Latinos. The problem is with your policies, not with your lack of Latino candidates.
Young voters don't like it when you use all of your energy to destroy a president who they worked so hard to elect, around whom they formed an historic movement, and to whom they feel a tight emotional and generational connection. When the same old white people in your party who created our economic problems viciously attack the first president who speaks to their generation, you are by extension attacking them too.
My point is this. If you spent half as much energy actually listening to your fellow Americans instead of demonizing them, then perhaps you wouldn't be feeling like shit today, and your party wouldn't be facing political oblivion.
But now the election is over, and you've lost once again, you have a choice to make and an opportunity to change. So before you do anything too rash, allow us to offer you a few pieces of advice.
First, the millionaire pundits on FOX and conservative talk radio are willfully lying to you. By now, you must at least realize that they lied to you about the polls being inaccurate, and about the certainty of a Republican victory in 2012. So just take a moment to ask yourself, if they are lying to you about polls, then what else are they lying to you about? Global warming being a hoax, perhaps. Barack Obama being a socialist, perhaps. Healthcare reform taking away your freedoms, perhaps. Please think about it for just a moment. You see, to them you are nothing but ratings at best, useful fools at worst. They are parasites whose multi-million dollar salaries depend on your perpetual fear and anger, so it is in their interests to keep fueling it. And please don't give us any drivel about the ratings of FOX News. Yes, we know they have the highest ratings. That's because they're preaching to an attentive choir. Which means you. But where did their ratings get you? You still lost.
Second, Americans don't like ideological extremism. During the election campaign, Romney's poll numbers were down in the dumps for as long as Obama was able to define him as a right-wing ideologue. That's because Americans don't like ideologues. You may have noticed that his numbers only bounced after he redefined himself as a reasonable moderate during the first debate. If that didn't tell you anything about how Americans feel about ideological intransigence, I don't know what will. Do you seriously think that you lost Senate races to Democrats in deep red states like Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, West Virginia and Indiana because your candidates weren't extreme enough? If you want to double down on ideological purity, we can't stop you, but it'll be your party's funeral.
Third, America is not the country you think it is or wish it was, and it never will be. It is not populated by makers and takers, but a rich tapestry of individuals from all ethnic, cultural and sociological backgrounds, all of whom both make and take. You are taking whenever you drive on a public highway, fly in a plane, use the Internet, drink clean water, take safe medication, call on emergency services, or send your kids to a public school. You are reaping the benefits of things that have been paid for by other taxpayers, both past and present. And no, you didn't build those things. We all did.
Americans, by and large, have always been a compassionate and generous people who believe in fairness, not feudalism. When Oliver Stone wrote the character of Gordon Gekko, he was intended as a warning against excess and greed, not a celebration of it.
This year, Americans were asked a simple question about what kind of society they wanted to live in. After a grueling two-year campaign and billions of dollars in advertising from both sides, they sent a loud and clear message. Their message is that they believe in a fair tax system in which the wealthiest should pay a little more, that they support same-sex marriage, that they support a woman's right to choose, and that they support a safety net for the less fortunate. At the same time, they have rejected the Darwinian free market fundamentalism, and the ideals of Randian plutocracy your party now so openly celebrates. You couldn't change their minds with $900 million dollars in campaign advertising, not even when conservative advocacy groups were outspending their liberal counterparts by three-to-one.
You are afraid. We get that, and it's okay. The world is changing too rapidly for you to keep up, and change is scary. We understand. But so do the right-wing demagogues on FOX, who exploit your fear to line their own pockets. However, change is inevitable, and screaming into the wind isn't going to stop it, any more than $900 million in right-wing campaigning did. Denying that global warming is a reality won't stop it either. Neither will calling the President a socialist. And neither will pretending that those who disagree with you are all looking for a handout.
Over the past four years, your side has engaged in a relentless and furious effort to destroy President Obama, holding tea parties all over the country, screaming your rage and hatred at the top of your lungs and demonizing every one of your fellow countrymen who dares to support him. Now you've just spent nearly a billion dollars trying to defeat him in what you kept telling everybody was the most important election in America's history. You outspent us by a huge margin. You stirred your base into a frenzy of anti-Obama rage, unlike anything we've seen in our lifetimes.
Yet after all that, you still lost. Worse, you didn't just lose. You got shellacked. You got shellacked even harder than many of us liberals expected. Worse even than many of the public polls predicted, even those that you thought were unfairly biased towards Obama.
So maybe, just maybe, after two successive shellackings by a President you convinced yourselves was destined for failure, the problem isn't him. It's you. More specifically, it's your party. It's your policies. And more than anything, it's your addiction to demonizing and alienating the vast majority of Americans who just happen not to see the world the same way you do. When you purge your party of the voices of moderation and reason, and insist on ideological purity, don't be surprised when your party shrinks to the size of Rush Limbaugh's genitals.
You'll probably ignore all of this advice, and in your state of denial, convince yourself that the reason you lost is because you weren't extreme enough, or because the sixty million of us who voted for Obama only wants a handout. You can tell yourself that all you want, but it won't make it true. No more than telling yourself that polls have a liberal bias made a Romney landslide come true.
So in years to come, when you are sitting up late one night, wondering why the GOP is no longer a viable political party and why Americans have completely abandoned conservatism as a governing philosophy, please don't say that nobody warned you.
The rest is up to you. It is, after all, your party. Which means you can cry if you want to. Just don't come crying to us.
Sincerely,
The Progressive Majority
We know that this is a difficult time for you right now, and that you are still in shock over an election that you were so certain that you were going to win. As impolite as it might be to say "we told you so", it has to be said that.... well, we told you so.
We tried to warn you that your idols on FOX News and AM Radio were lying to you. We tried to warn you that most Americans are repelled by ideological extremism, no matter from which side it comes. We tried to warn you that an incumbent president has vast structural advantages when it comes to re-election, especially when his party has won the popular vote in four of the last five elections.
Sadly for you, and fortunately for us, you wouldn't listen. You convinced yourselves that the rest of America felt exactly the same as you, and shared your antipathy towards this President. You convinced yourselves that the millions who voted for President Obama in 2008 only did so because we wanted a black President, or because we were voting against George W. Bush, or because he had star quality, or because we wanted a handout.
Then as now, you demonstrated how little you understand about the majority of your fellow countrymen who think differently from you.
So if you ever develop the circumspection to ask yourselves why your side got shellacked in 2008, and why it happened again this year, allow us to lay it out for you.
The American people don't like it when you call them lazy scroungers just because they have different political views from you. Especially when those people run the gamut of American society, from business leaders to single mothers who are working three minimum-wage jobs to feed their families.
Women don't like it when your ideological leaders call them sluts. Neither do they like it when old, white men in your party try repeatedly to defund the healthcare providers upon which many of them rely. And they certainly don't like it when your candidates tell them that rape won't get them pregnant because they have secret female mechanisms to prevent that. The war over sexual equality has been long decided, and you lost it decades ago. America is not going back to the 1950s, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner we can all move on.
African-Americans don't like it when you keep using the same racist, dog-whistle phrases to attack them as those you used during the segregationist era. If you don't think African-Americans know you're attacking them when you mock "Chicago politics" or "food stamps" or "Detroit", then you underestimate the intelligence of African-Americans. One more thing. They don't particularly like it either when you use such terms to attack the first African-American president in our history. Pointing at token African-American Republicans like Allen West or Clarence Thomas to demonstrate your racial tolerance isn't going to fix the damage you've already done.
Latinos don't like it when your presidential candidate talks about "self-deportation", or when he browns up his face before he panders to them on Univision. Once again, Marco Rubio isn't the answer to your problems with Latinos. The problem is with your policies, not with your lack of Latino candidates.
Young voters don't like it when you use all of your energy to destroy a president who they worked so hard to elect, around whom they formed an historic movement, and to whom they feel a tight emotional and generational connection. When the same old white people in your party who created our economic problems viciously attack the first president who speaks to their generation, you are by extension attacking them too.
My point is this. If you spent half as much energy actually listening to your fellow Americans instead of demonizing them, then perhaps you wouldn't be feeling like shit today, and your party wouldn't be facing political oblivion.
But now the election is over, and you've lost once again, you have a choice to make and an opportunity to change. So before you do anything too rash, allow us to offer you a few pieces of advice.
First, the millionaire pundits on FOX and conservative talk radio are willfully lying to you. By now, you must at least realize that they lied to you about the polls being inaccurate, and about the certainty of a Republican victory in 2012. So just take a moment to ask yourself, if they are lying to you about polls, then what else are they lying to you about? Global warming being a hoax, perhaps. Barack Obama being a socialist, perhaps. Healthcare reform taking away your freedoms, perhaps. Please think about it for just a moment. You see, to them you are nothing but ratings at best, useful fools at worst. They are parasites whose multi-million dollar salaries depend on your perpetual fear and anger, so it is in their interests to keep fueling it. And please don't give us any drivel about the ratings of FOX News. Yes, we know they have the highest ratings. That's because they're preaching to an attentive choir. Which means you. But where did their ratings get you? You still lost.
Second, Americans don't like ideological extremism. During the election campaign, Romney's poll numbers were down in the dumps for as long as Obama was able to define him as a right-wing ideologue. That's because Americans don't like ideologues. You may have noticed that his numbers only bounced after he redefined himself as a reasonable moderate during the first debate. If that didn't tell you anything about how Americans feel about ideological intransigence, I don't know what will. Do you seriously think that you lost Senate races to Democrats in deep red states like Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, West Virginia and Indiana because your candidates weren't extreme enough? If you want to double down on ideological purity, we can't stop you, but it'll be your party's funeral.
Third, America is not the country you think it is or wish it was, and it never will be. It is not populated by makers and takers, but a rich tapestry of individuals from all ethnic, cultural and sociological backgrounds, all of whom both make and take. You are taking whenever you drive on a public highway, fly in a plane, use the Internet, drink clean water, take safe medication, call on emergency services, or send your kids to a public school. You are reaping the benefits of things that have been paid for by other taxpayers, both past and present. And no, you didn't build those things. We all did.
Americans, by and large, have always been a compassionate and generous people who believe in fairness, not feudalism. When Oliver Stone wrote the character of Gordon Gekko, he was intended as a warning against excess and greed, not a celebration of it.
This year, Americans were asked a simple question about what kind of society they wanted to live in. After a grueling two-year campaign and billions of dollars in advertising from both sides, they sent a loud and clear message. Their message is that they believe in a fair tax system in which the wealthiest should pay a little more, that they support same-sex marriage, that they support a woman's right to choose, and that they support a safety net for the less fortunate. At the same time, they have rejected the Darwinian free market fundamentalism, and the ideals of Randian plutocracy your party now so openly celebrates. You couldn't change their minds with $900 million dollars in campaign advertising, not even when conservative advocacy groups were outspending their liberal counterparts by three-to-one.
You are afraid. We get that, and it's okay. The world is changing too rapidly for you to keep up, and change is scary. We understand. But so do the right-wing demagogues on FOX, who exploit your fear to line their own pockets. However, change is inevitable, and screaming into the wind isn't going to stop it, any more than $900 million in right-wing campaigning did. Denying that global warming is a reality won't stop it either. Neither will calling the President a socialist. And neither will pretending that those who disagree with you are all looking for a handout.
Over the past four years, your side has engaged in a relentless and furious effort to destroy President Obama, holding tea parties all over the country, screaming your rage and hatred at the top of your lungs and demonizing every one of your fellow countrymen who dares to support him. Now you've just spent nearly a billion dollars trying to defeat him in what you kept telling everybody was the most important election in America's history. You outspent us by a huge margin. You stirred your base into a frenzy of anti-Obama rage, unlike anything we've seen in our lifetimes.
Yet after all that, you still lost. Worse, you didn't just lose. You got shellacked. You got shellacked even harder than many of us liberals expected. Worse even than many of the public polls predicted, even those that you thought were unfairly biased towards Obama.
So maybe, just maybe, after two successive shellackings by a President you convinced yourselves was destined for failure, the problem isn't him. It's you. More specifically, it's your party. It's your policies. And more than anything, it's your addiction to demonizing and alienating the vast majority of Americans who just happen not to see the world the same way you do. When you purge your party of the voices of moderation and reason, and insist on ideological purity, don't be surprised when your party shrinks to the size of Rush Limbaugh's genitals.
You'll probably ignore all of this advice, and in your state of denial, convince yourself that the reason you lost is because you weren't extreme enough, or because the sixty million of us who voted for Obama only wants a handout. You can tell yourself that all you want, but it won't make it true. No more than telling yourself that polls have a liberal bias made a Romney landslide come true.
So in years to come, when you are sitting up late one night, wondering why the GOP is no longer a viable political party and why Americans have completely abandoned conservatism as a governing philosophy, please don't say that nobody warned you.
The rest is up to you. It is, after all, your party. Which means you can cry if you want to. Just don't come crying to us.
Sincerely,
The Progressive Majority