Don't Mess With The Bull, You'll Get The Horns

This started as a comment, but then it grew into a post. Aren't you lucky.

I know some of my readers find it pleasing to feel superior, but many of them couldn't have more completely misunderstood what I said. And by the way, Caca, rolling out tired "communist" BS is about as far from cracking skulls as a My Little Pony movie. I didn't mean "pass out ice cream" to be some Medicare/Welfare program on steroids. If you read what I wrote, you'll find that I was speaking of the HOW, not the WHAT. I didn't mean to actually hand out ice cream. Or hand out anything for that matter. The idea was to make your policy proposal, ANY policy proposal (even a cut!), feel like the greatest thing in the world to voters. The GOP used this exact technique to bamboozle everyone into Iraq. You know, greeted as liberators, oil pays for everything, cakewalk, all that crap. They made it seem like to oppose their idea was akin to opposing a Fourth of July parade. They believed it, they talked it up, they sold it, and you bought it. This is precisely what Democrats never do. And it's also precisely what Democrats must start to do. "Passing out ice cream cones" is the outlook that Democrats must have on their own ideas to make anything happen. No matter what policy is, they have to be resolute in thinking a) it's the greatest policy of all time and b) anyone who opposes it is an idiot. This kind of thinking is basically how the GOP wins elections. I'm just trying to photocopy their playbook. Some liberal policies might make you cringe, like Guaranteed Health Care For All Americans (even though I'm still not sure why that one does), and some others might not, like election reform and immigration reform. But my point is, no matter what position the Dems take, they have got to stop apologizing for taking it. Instead of acting like a guilty mother trying to get her unwilling child to take his medicine, Dems have got to believe that they're behind the wheel of the neighborhood ice cream truck.

And pleeeeeaaase cut it out with the crap about liberalism being somehow anti-capitalist. I am as capitalist as they come. Where there is a functioning market (that part is important by the way), that market should be allowed to function. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most competition squelching subsidies have found their genesis on the right side of the aisle. From where I sit, the chump change that gets handed out via welfare (to guvmint-hating Red State folks mostly) pales in comparison to the billions in handouts given to industry each year. And what's so capitalist about our propping up the freeloading American sugar industry? Has it ever occurred to you guys that competition is a consumer oriented phenomenon? Don't you realize that when businesses are allowed to draft their own laws, like the oil companies did Cheney's energy bill, that this is inescapably and by its very nature anti-competition? But then again, why should you? "Penny wise and pound foolish" has been the mark of the right wing for about 25 years now.